


Clipped Wings

by rabidsamfan



Series: Diversions [2]
Category: Cabin Pressure, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, internet research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-01-27 21:05:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 107
Words: 53,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1722524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything has been going so well that Martin should have known his luck would change.  Tony, on the other hand, has no clue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is definitely going sideways off of flawedamythyst's Seduction by Aviation universe. Mostly because anyone who's acquainted with my work knows me for two things. Drabbles and whump. And given two of the whumpiest characters I've ever encountered, some things are inevitable.
> 
> Some chapters will probably be drabbles, given the time limitations of my real life, but I'm not limiting myself to them this time. Do expect potato chip chapters for the most part though. I'll try to update frequently to make up for them!

Tony, in spite of his promise to Martin to get some rest, had every intention of getting up and going to his workshop after a quick nap. He wanted to mess with one of the spare gauntlets -- see if he couldn’t find a way to accommodate the ring which Martin had given him just before flying back to Fitton. Unfortunately, his body had other plans, and he ended up doing most of the designing in his dreams. 

It was hunger that woke him. Hunger, and the realization that he’d slept well over ten hours. Tony lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling as he tried to work out just why he’d been left to doze despite Pepper and Steve’s inevitable impositions on anything that resembled free time. Maybe the clock was wrong. Maybe he was still asleep. Maybe... 

“Good afternoon, sir,” JARVIS said softly, as if testing the waters. 

“Afternoon?” Tony echoed lazily. If he was only dreaming, then perhaps he didn’t need to be awake after all. Except for being hungry that was. “Is lunchtime over already?” 

“Yes, sir. Although Captain Rogers set aside a plate for you. Shall I inform him that you have awakened?” 

“Hm... No. No rush.” Other parts than his stomach were starting to check in. His bladder for one. And he felt grimy. He wanted a shower. 

He rolled over as a preliminary to crawling out of bed and found his nose buried in the pillow that still smelled faintly of Martin, so he stopped to breathe in the scent before it could get exorcised by the cleaning crew. After a time, he remembered that he was supposed to be waking up. This time he pushed himself upright and let his feet dangle. “Gah,” he said, adding a toothbrush to the list of things that needed to be in his immediate future. “JARVIS, why on earth have you let me turn into Rip Van Winkle? I never sleep this long.” Not unless he’d gone to bed trashed, which one whiskey on the way back from the airport in the limo wouldn’t even begin to do. 

“Captain Crieff asked me not to disturb you until his plane landed,” JARVIS confessed. “The calculations were thrown off because MJN Air was put into a holding pattern upon their arrival at England. They are still flying, at present.” 

Tony frowned. “What’s their fuel like?” He was pretty sure JARVIS was monitoring the radio transmissions, even though he’d forgot to ask the AI to do it. JARVIS was smart that way. 

“At the last radio check-in, two minutes ago, Captain Crieff indicated that they have 175 liters of fuel available, which translates into approximately twenty minutes of flight time under normal conditions. The tower has put them at number three for landing, which should have them on the ground within ten minutes.” 

“Just enough time for a shower, then,” Tony said. pushing off the bed and heading for the bathroom. “Tell Steve to start heating up my lunch.”


	2. Chapter 2

Martin watched his fingers fluttering against the control column with a strange sense of detached frustration. “Douglas,” he said at last, because thirty seconds from now he wouldn’t have the choice. “Please take the landing. I think I’ve had too much coffee.” It was true, unfortunately, and the deteriorating conditions over the past two hours spent in the holding pattern meant that GERTI would need every scrap of luck which her crew could muster. 

Douglas, thank goodness, didn’t even blink. “I have control,” he acknowledged and leaned forward a little, bringing that extra edge of experience into play as he doublechecked the instruments. Outside the aeroplane the raindrops were lashing down, the winds driving them so hard that the lowering sun barely made a scrap of difference. It was only optimism that had Martin looking down, hoping for a glimpse of the runways below. 

Martin caught his leg jiggling up and down and stilled it. He wasn’t nervous. Not really. He trusted Douglas to get them down safely. But the caffeine singing through his veins made it hard to resist the urge to grab control back again, to be the Heroic Pilot Taking Command To Save The Day. 

“I should have stuck to tea,” he said softly, not wanting to interrupt Douglas’s conversation with the tower. He’d been so pleased with himself for figuring out that the contraption sitting in their galley was an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by some Avenger most likely, and aimed at Tony, given that when you pulled one of the levers it began to play “Happy Birthday” on kazoo. The thing made other noises too, much to Arthur’s delight, but once you ignored all the bells and whistles (literally!) you could in fact brew a perfectly decent cup of coffee. Better than decent, given the supplies which had appeared in the galley cabinets. Caroline had been so pleased. And Martin, foolish mortal that he was, had definitely overindulged.

And if it hadn’t been for the storm exceeding every expectation the weather wallahs had decreed, it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest. 

The radio had begun to chatter as they passed south of Iceland, with airlines discussing options and pilots asking for diversions. There’d been at least three “smoke in the cockpit” emergencies looking to park at Reykjavik, and a handful of more formal diversions. Martin, cognizant in an entirely new way of the cost involved in diverting, had consulted with Carolyn and Douglas, and with every system on board still happily in the green they’d agreed it was safer to go on.

But that was before the coast of Ireland and the news that one of the runways at Heathrow had gone down. Every smaller plane in the queue there had been diverted north, and GERTI, still coming from America, had arrived late to the party.

It was time. Martin knew that Carolyn and Arthur were already in their seats, belted against the turbulence, but he reached for the intercom anyway. “Cabin crew, prepare for landing.”


	3. Chapter 3

Tony was still in the shower when JARVIS told him that Martin was safely on the ground in Fitton. “And Captain Rogers has asked me to advise you that your lunch will not require heating, just eating. Miss Potts is also aware that you are awake and has three priority messages for you.”

Tony yawned and put his head under the water again. Given how wonderfully lazy the last few days with Martin had been, Pepper probably had a lot more than three messages for him. But he couldn’t call Martin yet. It always took at least ten minutes for them to park GERTI and get through the post-flight routine. He might as well find out what else the day had in store. “Okay, JARVIS, let’s start with Pep’s messages, the news highlights, and the weather, but give me a break in ten so I can check in with Martin.”

“Yes, sir.” 

 

He was at the sink, reshaping the night-roughened edges of his beard and listening to JARVIS read the headlines when JARVIS suddenly stopped mid-sentence. “Sir, I’ve lost contact with Fitton airport.”

“Storm interference or satellite down?” Tony asked, dropping the razor and heading for the bedroom. His phone was still in the pocket of the pants he’d sloughed off last night. “Look for an alternate.”

“Working.” JARVIS never got that concise unless he was directing a huge amount of resources to a problem. 

Martin’s number was busy. Martin’s number was _never_ busy. “JARVIS, can we listen in?”

JARVIS didn’t acknowledge, but suddenly the speaker came alive with Martin’s voice, pitched high and panicked. “....knocked on it’s side. We’ll need all the help you can send! Oh god, the tower’s dark. The whole field has lost power. Notify ATC at Bristol. Oh, god, there are flights overhead that don’t... SHIT!” There was clattering sound -- the phone hitting the ground -- followed by the unmistakable thump of an explosion.

“Suit!” Tony yelled, and started running. He took the stairs down to the main level three at a time, ignoring the plate of sandwiches Steve had out. JARVIS had a suit open and ready. He dived into it, swearing when the ring on his finger fouled up the gauntlet. He pulled off the ring, dropped it with a pang of regret, but he needed the gauntlet if he wanted to fly, and there was no time to waste. Martin needed him _now_.


	4. Chapter 4

Tony was halfway to Rhode Island before he thought of something he could do. 

“JARVIS, can you get a phone number to go with the email of that guy who sent pictures of me and Martin from the air show?”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS said. “Do you wish me to stop monitoring Captain Crieff’s call?” 

“No.” He’d never stopped listening to the faint sounds from Martin’s phone, and there’d been two more explosions already. Quieter ones, which hopefully meant they were smaller, not just farther away. But Martin hadn’t come back to the phone, and he might. There was no way Tony wanted to lose that connection. “No, keep monitoring, and recording. But get me the other call too.”

“Right, sir.” 

The phone rang once, twice, thrice, and then picked up and a female voice said, “Cambridge News, may I help you?” She sounded young, and bored.

Tony tried to sound calm. “I’m trying to reach, damn, JARVIS, what was the email address?” It flashed up onto the heads up display. “T. Young. The photographer.”

“I’m sorry,” she didn’t sound it, “but he’s out covering a story.”

“Is he anywhere near the airfield at Fitton? Can he get there fast?”

“Fitton?”

Damn. What was the nearest big town? Right. “Near Coventry.”

“Why?” 

“There’s been an explosion. More than one. The first was less than ten minutes ago. I need someone to go and see. Preferably someone with a camera and a phone.”

“You need?” But he could hear her rustling papers now, and her boredom had vanished. 

“My name is Tony Stark. He sent me some pictures from Duxford. He’ll know.”

“Tony Stark? The Tony Stark?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” she said. “Right. And I’m supposed to believe that?” She sounded like she hoped he could prove it and was certain that he couldn’t. “How would Tony Stark know about an explosion in some place I’ve never heard of in England?”

“JARVIS, patch her into Martin’s call,” Tony ordered. JARVIS did, and cranked up the gain. Shouts and screams heard distantly through rain and flame, and thank god, the distant sounds of sirens at last. “Martin’s a friend of mine,” Tony said. “He dropped his phone. I need eyes there. Please.” 

He thought about having Pepper call, but sincerity seemed have done the trick. “I’ll call Tom,” the girl said shakily. “We’ll get you your pictures. Just let me write down your number.”


	5. Chapter 5

Tony set the autopilot in the suit for the Great Circle route to Fitton, grateful, in a detached sort of way, that for the first hour he’d be near enough to the North American coast to pick up any discussions there might be about air disasters on the radio. He flipped through the frequencies with one ear, but most of the chatter was about the storm, still an expanding smudge of cloud off to the southeast, visible from the higher altitudes. JARVIS was still trying to collect any information from the satellite feeds from England. One of the radio stations in Coventry had picked up on the 999 calls, and dispatched a reporter by the time Tony passed Providence, and there’d been a “breaking news” line on the BBC, which had Tony rooting for the media for the first time in his life, because the terse conversations on the emergency frequencies weren’t enough to give him more than a vague outline. A plane had crashed, and it hadn’t been GERTI. That’s all he knew for sure. And Pepper and Cap both thought he should wait for news in New York, and that _wasn’t going to happen_. 

He knew that too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm basing Tony's travel time on this: http://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=JFK-CVT&DU=km&DM=&SG=1.5&SU=mach If you click on the "map" button you'll see the actual route.


	6. Chapter 6

“Just boxers?” Pepper asked again, although Steve had answered that question twice. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, because this was Pepper in CEO mode and not the Pepper who showed up occasionally for movie night and hassled Tony when he forgot to eat. “And no breakfast,” Steve added, reminded. “I think he must have had a shower though.”

On the holograms around the living room JARVIS had thrown up feeds from the BBC, the National Hurricane Center, and various security cameras that had to be somewhere near Fitton, judging by the traffic jams and the darker patch of sky that might be smoke seen through rain they’d glimpsed before the current rain band pushed its way into the area and reduced visibility to a matter of yards. There was a map showing airplane transponders, with a red dot imposed on it that was Tony, just beginning to thread his way through the complications near Boston.

“At that speed he’ll be in England in three hours,” Steve noted.

“Yes,” Pepper said sourly, “Nearly naked and half-starved. It’s not a good look on...” She snapped her fingers. “Rhodey.”

“What?” Steve wanted to ask Pepper how Iron Patriot could help when he was based in California, but she already had her phone out, and his enhanced hearing was granting him both sides of the conversation.

“Colonel Rhodes.” 

“Rhodey, Tony’s in the suit with no clothes and he hasn’t eaten since yesterday. If I can talk him into landing somewhere in Maine can you arrange for someone to give him food and something to wear?”

“Do I want to know?” But Steve could hear the tap of computer keys. 

“Yes, but I don’t have time to explain and convince Tony too. Just get me a place and a person.”

A pause. And then another rattle of keys. “Okay, tell him Bangor, outside the 101st on the west side. It’s got the designation on the hangar roof so he can’t miss it, but I’ll send JARVIS the map. Major George Bannerman is the person and he’ll be there in ten.”

“Thanks, Rhodey.” Pepper called Tony then, and began haranguing him. 

Steve knew throwing his two cents in would only make Tony stubborn, so he went over to get a better look at the map. As he went down into the center area, he felt something under his shoe. It was Martin’s ring, he realized, seeing the coat of arms.  
The last time he’d seen it it had been on Tony’s finger though, last night, on the long, sleepy ride back up the elevator when they’d gotten home from the airport. 

It wouldn’t fit in the gauntlet. That’s why it was here still. But Steve was pretty sure that Tony would never have meant for it to be lost or swept up by a cleaning bot. Or abandoned. He made a decision. Pepper had her resources. He had his. He got out his phone and hit the speed dial. “Thor? Get back here. Tony needs your help.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Major Bannerman!” Airman Stevens pointed to the sky. “There!”

“Right. Get that table out here.” The three airmen and two sergeants who he’d rooked into helping him dived for the hangar door, although Stevens was going to break his neck, trying to watch Iron Man land at the same time he helped carry out the table they’d prepared.

A flight suit, a fresh pack of longjohns, clean tube socks, assorted civvies scrounged out of cars, microwaved white castle burgers, an apple, three energy bars, coffee and juice out of the machine. Colonel Rhodes insisted that Tony Stark did not like things being handed to him, so the table was the best George could do.

The red and gold dot in the sky grew at an alarming rate, until Iron Man was hovering twenty feet off, killing the last of his acceleration with a maneuver that left dents in the hot asphalt below from his propulsion... whatever it was. George knew jets, not the kind of tech that came out of science fiction. But having stopped mid-air, Stark made the rest of the trip almost sedately, landing neatly directly in front of George. The face plate flipped up, revealing a pale face struggling for a smile. “Tony Stark.”

George shook the offered hand and waved at the table. “George Bannerman,” he said, “We pulled together what we could, Mr. Stark, but there’s not much in the way of choices.”

Stark nodded and did something. The suit opened up, all the front sections sliding back into the back until he could step out of it. “Shit,” the billionaire genius exclaimed when his bare foot hit the hot pavement. 

“Here,” Stevens pulled off his fatigue jacket and spread it on the ground while Mercier and Lopez dashed back into the hangar for the scrap of rug that lived in the canteen.

“Thanks, Sir Walter,” Stark told Stevens, who blushed and shrugged. The billionaire stepped out of the suit, which closed up behind him. He was wearing nothing but skivvies and something like a bluetooth earpiece, and his face still had dried up shaving cream on one side.

Sgt Guled held up a pair of socks, “Will these help, sir?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Stark cupped his hands to receive the tossed socks. “Thanks for taking all this trouble, guys.”

“We’re the 101st M-m-m-AINEiacs, sir,” Stevens chirped up. “We c-c-can refuel anything.”

Stark’s smile grew a little more genuine, but it wasn’t like he was happy. Something about the kid had reminded him of something, or someone, somehow. George promised himself that he would find out someday what this was all about, even if he had to fly out to California and give Rhodes grief in person. But now was not the time for questions. He had a weather briefing to give.

Stark hesitated over the flight suit, but ended up in the long johns and civvies, pausing only long enough to register the names of the guys the clothes belonged to. He needed shoes, but no one had the right size, and it was clear he wasn’t going to wait. But he wolfed down the food, nodding as George read through the weather details all the way to England. 

“That’s all I’ve got,” George had to admit, as Stark emptied the bottle of juice.

“It’ll do,” Stark said, offering his hand again. “For a ten minute lead time, you did miracles.” He took the time to shake the others’ hands as well, for all that he was impatient to leave. Engrained public relations skills no doubt.

Then he was in the suit, and gone.


	8. Chapter 8

Tony made a note to give Pepper a raise, if she hadn’t given herself one already. His stomach had stopped growling for food now, and the suit had stopped pinching him in awkward places. It had never been designed to be a second skin, and he knew that all too intimately now. Besides, two layers of clothes meant he could go for a much higher altitude without diverting as much power to the heating system, hitching a ride on the jet stream. It wasn’t like there were a lot of commercial flights heading in this direction, after all, and even the militaries were grounding most of their fleets to wait out the massive storm just now going extratropical as it slammed into the coasts of England and Europe with sustained winds barely below hurricane force. The disaster at Fitton was having to compete with all manner of other news stories, catastrophes all. Apologetic meteorologists tried to explain why the storm had beaten the odds of the computer models, and crackpot conspiracy theorists were already making noises about alien invasions. The winds were knocking satellite connections loose, too, interrupting signals already scratchy with interference. 

Nova Scotia was behind and Newfoundland ahead when JARVIS broke in to the BBC livestream to say that there was an incoming call from Tom Young. 

“Hello? Mr. Stark?”

“Yes. I’m here. Are you at Fitton yet?”

“No, but a friend of mine called Andrew Barrow is. May I conference call?” Later, Tony would probably appreciate that courtesy; the fact that Young had remembered how little he’d wanted publicity at Duxford. But for now it didn’t matter how much the world knew. What mattered was how much Tony could find out. 

“Sure, go ahead.”

There was the buzz of the phone ringing and then a new voice picked up. An older man, trained for radio or television by the accent and smooth delivery. “Barrow here. Is this an urgent call?”

“Andrew it’s Tom Young of Cambridge News. I’ve got Tony Stark on the line, and he’s looking for   
information about what’s happening there. Pictures too, if you’ve got any.”

“Tony Stark?” Barrow’s voice dripped with skepticism. Why did no one ever believe he was calling?

“That’s right,” Tony interjected. “I’m on my way, but I’m a good two and half hours out. I’d really appreciate knowing what’s happening.”

“It _is_ Tony Stark,” Tom Young came back again. “I met him in person, ‘Drew, just a few days ago. He’s got a friend who flies out of Fitton.”

“Name of the friend?” Tony didn’t have to see Barrow to know that he’d pulled out a notepad.

“Martin Crieff. MJN Air.” Tony supplied. “Do you know what happened?”

“From what I’ve been able to find out a Essex Charters flight somehow missed the runway and came down on top of some parked aeroplanes and the airport fire crew. Took out the power lines and phone lines too. Luckily, someone called it in, because the crash set off a chain reaction of planes blowing up.”

“Do you have any pictures?” Tony had always known he worked better with visuals than audibles, and he was desperate for something to look at.

“Of course,” Barrow said. “Here, I’ll send you anything with people in it.”

Tony’s inbox began to fill with files, and he thanked Barrow hastily, promising to identify anyone he recognized for the broadcaster in return for the favor. The first person he recognized was Carolyn, pale with shock. Then Arthur, leaning against a fireman, and Douglas docile under the hands of a paramedic.

There was no sign of Martin.


	9. Chapter 9

Arthur sat on the bus where the fireman had left him, holding his Mum’s hand and wishing he believed a little bit more that everything would be all right. The bus was full of pilots and other people, and that was good because being on the bus meant you weren’t hurt so badly that you had to be in an ambulance. But Douglas wasn’t on the bus. And Martin... 

Arthur bit his lip and promised himself that he would have a good long cry once he and Mum got home. This was still the being brave part. And they had been brave, all of them, even though the everything was scarier than having a goose take out an engine. And now the firemen and the paramedics and the rescue people had come and there hadn’t been another explosion in ages and it _would_ all be all right, wouldn’t it?

A gigantic flash of light and boom made him flinch, but it was lightning, not an explosion, and he could breathe, really he could, and blink through the green light in his head to try to see...

A tall figure in a cloak, striding through the rain. Arthur’s heart leapt.

“THOR!”


	10. Chapter 10

Thor had warned The Captain that his fastest method of travel might increase the fury of the storm, and the wind whipping the rain into his eyes and beard was proving him out. The Midgardians who were not taking shelter were bent nearly double against it, and he could only hope that the effects would abate before any more harm was done. Not that anyone would know what to blame on his arrival, given the chaos of broken airplanes and burning structures he had landed by. But he was on a mission to ensure that the Friends of Stark were safe, and if injured, found within what Bruce Healer called the Golden Hour. No slower means of transport would have done.

“Thor!” Most of the folk calling his name were strangers, but one voice he recognized, even through the wind. He made his way to one of the large vehicles called a bus and was met at the door by Friend Arthur. “Thor!” the young man cried, throwing himself into the god’s arms. “We lost Martin!”

“Lost?” Thor said, embracing Arthur before setting him back upon his feet. He had heard Men speak of the dead as being lost, but the spark of hope stayed shining as Arthur babbled on.

“He went to get a forklift. He said he’d come back. But he didn’t! He didn’t! And I don’t know where to find him!”

“Coventry,” said a bitter voice. “Ran for it when the planes started to go up, no doubt, and left us still upside down.” The speaker was a middle-aged man dressed as firefighter, whose head was wrapped in bandages and whose arm was in a splint.

“He wouldn’t,” Arthur rounded on the accusation. “Martin wouldn’t run away. You know he wouldn’t, Phil.”

“Well, he didn’t come back, and now Terry’s dead, isn’t he?” The grief in the words explained the call for blame, but this was not the time.

“Peace!” Thor shouted, to cut off the argument. “I will search the field myself, and find the truth.”

“And Martin,” Arthur pleaded. “Find Martin, too!”

Thor clasped his shoulder in reassurance and stood back to give himself space to spin his hammer. He could search faster flying.

Once, twice, thrice across the field, skimming as low as he dared, until he saw something twitching under the edge of a piece of fuselage in the drainage ditch. 

A hand.


	11. Chapter 11

Martin was cold. 

And wet.

He needed to be alarmed by that. By the cold, and the wet. By the way it was creeping towards his mouth and nose and eyes. By the way it had already robbed him of feet and legs and back and stomach and one of his arms.

But oh, it was nice, not to feel his legs. Not to feel the pain, except in a vague, academic sort of way. It was nice to be too cold for fear, mostly. To drift so near unconsciousness.

He was dying. 

Probably.

He wished he could remember why.


	12. Chapter 12

Mariam Bah tugged the empty stretcher back towards the knot of greensuited emergency workers by the largest fuselage and began composing a letter to her cousin in her head. “Dear Peter,” it began. “Today I began my practical training as an ambulance technician. I put on a nice new uniform, and nice new shoes, and made sure that I had the bandage scissors you sent me when I said I was going to become a paramedic. They have come in quite useful, by the way. It turns out that being an ambulance technician is just as exciting as being a police constable in London, after all...”

She didn’t have to tell him that she had mostly used the scissors to cut open packets of triage tags, rather than applying her newly acquired medical skills. She wasn’t sure if she should resent being put on the paperwork, or grateful. Nine weeks in the classroom meant she knew how to spell the terms being thrown at her by the more experienced emergency medical personnel, and could decipher most of the acronyms. But she’d only thrown up once, which was probably at least as well as Peter had done when he’d seen his first headless body, and in spite of her inexperience she had really hoped to be more _hands-on_ for the hands-on part of her training. It would be nice to have more to do with all the adrenaline fizzing through her veins than take notes and drag stretchers. Any looby could do that.

The rain was working its way inside her cuff and down along her forearm, cold mingling with the warm sweat that had built up from being dressed in an outer layer that was mostly rubber. Just then, someone landed heavily not a foot from her side. Mariam squeaked and fell backwards before a massive hand reached out and caught her by the arm.

“You are a healer?” boomed the apparition, setting her upright. “Come! I have need of your assistance, and your bed upon wheels!” He grabbed the stretcher and headed off into the storm, well to the right of the main concentration of casualties. 

“Wait!” Mariam said, but she was being towed along despite any protest. The first wave of disbelief was already trying to dissipate, because there was no way not to recognize who had hijacked her stretcher. “Thor, wait! Where are we going?”

“Someone lies injured yonder, imprisoned beneath that tangle of metal. I cannot both lift it and free them without aid,” the god explained impatiently. “You must be that aid.”

“A casualty?” Against all good sense and reason Mariam felt herself getting excited.

“A friend of mine, I hope,” said Thor. “The hand in the mud looks like his.”

“Hand in the mud?” But they were close enough for her to see it for herself now. A man’s hand, palm down, just visible underneath a twisted piece of wing that had come to rest in the drainage ditch which ran between the runway and the taxiway.. She knelt hastily and checked for a pulse, her heart pounding so hard that for a moment she wasn’t sure what she felt. But it was there, fluttering under her fingertips. Thor positioned himself to begin lifting the tail and she waved at him to stop. “No, wait. If that’s pressing down on something then lifting it can make him crash. Let me assess him first.”

It meant going down on her belly in the grass and mud, squirming her way forward before remembering the flashlight in her pocket and having to squirm back to retrieve it. The casualty was male, in his thirties, shocky, cold, barely conscious, and immersed up to neck in the rising rainwater and mud of the ditch. It was hard to tell, but she thought both his legs might be trapped by the weight of metal above. 

She clicked on the radio at her shoulder, “Triage, this is Bah, I have another casualty, separate from the main group.”

“Alive or dead?” Jack Timothy, the Crew Leader, answered the call and Mariam cheered silently. He was the most experienced paramedic on the site.

“Alive, for the moment, but trapped with possible crush injures and hypothermia. And I’m pretty sure if we don’t get him out of here soon he’ll drown.”

“Where are you then?”

“Stand by,” Mariam said, and squirmed back out to look up at Thor. “We’re going to need the man with the green coat and yellow helmet. He’s working by the emergency lights over there.”

“I will fetch him straight away,” Thor said, and ran off. 

“Bah,” the radio crackled in her ear. “Where are you?”

She began squirming back under the wreckage to keep an eye on her patient, “Just follow the god of thunder, Boss. You’ll find us.”


	13. Chapter 13

Tony was probably going to have to upgrade his opinion of the press. The British press, at least. Or maybe just the little corner of it that he’d tapped into via Tom Young. Barrow had not only sent pictures, he’d talked his van tech into opening up JARVIS’s access to the raw feed of video from the Fitton disaster via satellite. Thanks to the wind there were frequent dropouts, but with three different cameras on site, Tony was getting a much clear idea of the situation on the ground. Best of all, he’d caught a glimpse of Thor flying past one of the cameras, which meant that Martin wouldn’t have to wait another two hours for Tony to get there.

But he was going to grind his teeth into shards all the same.

One of the feeds had Barrow, trying to balance his need for a story against the desire to mediate an argument between an injured fireman and and a nearly hysterical Arthur. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on; the audio dropped out every time the picture froze, and wasn’t very good to begin with, thanks to the wind and rain. But it sounded like the fireman was accusing Martin of panicking and running away, and Arthur was insisting that Martin wouldn’t never do such a thing.

And dammitalltohell, Tony wasn’t sure. As much as he loved Martin, there was no denying that the man was easy to fluster. And when it came to explosions, Tony was all in favor of people without suits running in the other direction. But still...

Thor appeared again on the feed, just as it froze. When it cleared again, the cameraman was running toward a chunk of wreckage and rescue guys waving lights. 

But he still couldn’t see Martin.


	14. Chapter 14

“The first problem is the water,” Jack Timothy said to the two members of his team he could afford to pull off sorting through the main wreck site to this side rescue, one of them a trainee so green she squeaked. That he was also saying it to an unexpected superhero, and probably half the country via the television camera two metres away didn’t make it any less true, but it did mean he needed to make sure he was clear. “All the flow from the runways goes into that ditch, and the bottom is mud, not concrete. We can’t tell if the water’s rising, or the ground’s being washed out from under our victim, but either way, we’ve got to do something. Ideas?”

Bah, who had already taken off her jacket to prop up the victim’s head, spoke up from where she still crouched, holding the one visible hand. “Could we get a back board to put under him? One of the long ones?”

Jack nodded. “That would help.” At least it would if they still had a backboard that hadn’t been sent along in an ambulance. He thumbed his radio and sent the request over to the police captain who had taken charge of the entire disaster site, and was promised that a runner would come as soon as a spare board was found.

“We could call for a backhoe,” Henry Irving said. “Dig a diversion ditch.” He gestured a half circle around the wreckage to illustrate what he meant. “Even if we only sent half the water a different direction it would help.”

Irving had only come over from Manchester two years ago, and Jack knew that he was good at the medical side of things, but he wasn’t always strong on the logistics of getting things done. “In this storm? It might take longer to get here than we have,” Jack pointed out, but he thumbed the radio again and sent along the request anyway.

“I’ll dig,” one of the civilians by the camera piped up. “I know where there are shovels, if you need them in a hurry.”

“That is a good thought, Friend Arthur, but Mjölnir is better than a hundred shovels,” Thor rumbled. “I shall make a new path for the water to travel. You stay with Martin, and bring him comfort.” 

Thor strode off about ten meters and began taking huge divots out of the ground with his hammer. That sorted, Jack took a better look at the civilians. He knew Barrow from news reports, and the cameraman’s job was obvious. But the third fellow was dressed like an aeroplane’s cabin crew. “You know the vi... patient?” he asked.

“Yes, yes. He’s Martin and I’m Arthur and he’s our Captain and is he going to be all right? You’re going to rescue him, right?” The young man who stepped forward had a face unaccustomed to worry. He was looking at Jack like Jack was going to wave some kind of magic wand and make everything be all right, and Jack found himself using the voice he normally kept for small children and elderly ladies. 

“We’re going to do our best,” he said. _Never lie to them,_ his first mentor’s words echoed at the back of his brain. _Never lie, because they’ll believe you when you do, and the truth will hurt far less than breaking that belief._ “And if you can do exactly what I tell you, right away when I tell you to do it, then you can help.” _Because Bah’s the skinniest of the lot of us, and I need her to crawl under the wreckage and give me a better idea of what we’re up against._

“I will. I promise.” Arthur nodded so hard that water sprayed from his hair. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to hold Martin’s hand and talk to him. Can you do that?”

“Yes!” For a moment a huge smile broke through the worry. “I’m good at talking.” But then Arthur frowned. “What do I say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jack said, steering Arthur over to take Bah’s place. “Stories, reassurances, whatever you like. Just let him know he’s not alone.”


	15. Chapter 15

_What is Arthur doing in hell?_

The rambling voice was definitely Arthur, discoursing on the brilliance of Cornish pasties and other foods folded into pockets of bread, not that there was any food to be had in Martin’s vicinity. In fact Martin was pretty sure he _must_ be in hell, because he was quite confident that tormenting the souls of the recently deceased wasn’t on the list for the other place, and it was just his luck to be the one to discover that thousands of years of religious philosophers had got the temperature wrong. 

They’d got the torture part right though. He’d never known it was possible to hurt so much that you couldn’t even remember what it was like not to be in pain. 

_Ignorance is bliss._

The thought made him want to laugh, and one part of the pain shifted as if he still had lungs and a mouth to laugh with.

“Martin?” Arthur’s tone changed. “Martin? Mariam, I think he heard me.”

“Did he? Let me see.”

A gentle touch and a flash of light. Martin gasped and opened his eyes, startled to discover that he still had them. Part of his vision was obscured by cloth, but after a blink or two he could make out a face, too dark and pretty to be Arthur’s, upside down to his own. The face smiled. 

“There you are.” She sounded like a Londoner, and her hand, resting against his cheek, was warm. “Don’t worry, Mister. We’re going to get you out of here as soon as we can.”

_I’m not dead?_

But there were too many questions for asking, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answers. 

One thing, though, he could put right. He pushed the taste of mud out of his mouth.

“Captain...”


	16. Chapter 16

For Tony, the world had come down to a single, fragmented video transmission. The trouble with digital signals was that they were either there or they weren’t. An old fashioned analog signal might have wobbles and snow and weird musical tones in the background that made it hard to hear what was being said, but at least when it wasn’t perfect you could still see something. 

He’d called Thor for updates and that had worked until the thunder god felt the need to go off to a less inhabited part of the field and pull down the lightnings that were building up in the storm down on himself before they could start striking all the bits of metal scattered around. Thor, of course, had taken no damage, but his Starkphone had been fried. Tony couldn’t really argue. He trusted Thor when it came to weather, even if he was better at making storms worse than making them ease off. And a lightning strike on the piece of airplane tail that was pinning Martin down would have been bad.

But that left Tony with the video feed. Barrow had gone off to a different camera, and was interviewing someone who had miraculously survived with nothing more than a few bruises despite being in a plane that had flipped onto its back and fallen apart. Carolyn was on a bus, now waiting patiently a few hundred yards from the hospital for a queue of ambulances making their way in and out of the emergency entrance. She’d texted Pepper, once she’d reached a place where her phone had enough reception to make it worth trying, and in another corner of the HUD, Tony could see the letters of their conversation slipping by. Something about Douglas having a possible concussion, and gratitude that Pepper knew where Arthur was. She’d passed along Arthur’s phone number, but Arthur wasn’t answering. Tony could see him lying near the wreckage, holding a muddy hand and talking like Martin’s life depended on it.

There were three rescue types working on Martin, and while Tony could have had JARVIS research them enough to find phone numbers, he had no intention of interrupting what they were doing. One of them, a slender black girl who looked like she was barely out of high school, kept getting sent under the wreckage, while the thirtysomething dude was placing supports around to keep the stuff from shifting position. The guy in charge was old enough to have gray hair under his helmet, and Tony could see he was the kind of person who carried an island of calm decision around him like an aura. He was answering the girl’s questions and handing her things like IVs and hypodermics as the water level around the wreckage got lower. The camera mike picked up a few words: “Tramadol” and “Sodium lactate” and “determine if there’s an allergy to Cipro...”

Tony flew on, listening and watching as the storm swarmed up from the south to meet him.


	17. Chapter 17

Mike Powers was pretty sure his arm was going to fall off soon. Either that or the weatherproofing on his camera was going to surrender to one of the gusts which kept tossing debris past his unprotected position. Luckily, the only bits that had actually hit him had been small, but there was no way that his luck was going to last when he was a hundred metres from anything resembling shelter..

This was no way to do a weather report, and Mike cursed the fates that had decided to arrange for a disaster on top of the worst storm he could remember. Usually, in a violent storm like this one, he’d be tucked into the shelter of a hotel entryway, getting a good laugh as Drew ventured out a few feet into the worst of the wind to get a few seconds of dramatic “don’t do this at home” coverage for the people who were very sensibly tucked in with cups of hot coffee or tea.

Mike really wanted a good hot cup of tea. If he had to stand out here much longer he’d be in as bad a case as the poor bastard who the paramedics were pulling out of the mud. Nevermind that he was getting great dramatic footage, and that the camera he was holding was considerably smaller than the behemoths he’d been carrying around ten years ago, he just couldn’t maintain this for very much longer. 

The lead paramedic was on the radio, arguing with someone. Mike edged closer, so his microphone (Mike’s mike, someone would inevitably joke) would pick up the words.

“I don’t care that the wind speeds are up, dammit. I’ve got a pinned leg and trying to dig out the mud underneath is going to make the damage worse. Get me car jacks, jaws of life, anything to lift this stuff five inches and we can get out of here.”

“Friend Healer!” Mike flinched as Thor’s booming voice announced the god’s return from his latest bout of catching lightning bolts. “Do not fret. If you are ready at last to free Tony’s Friend Martin from this trap, you need only ask. I can lift away the obstruction.”

Now _that_ would make for great footage! Possibly award winning! Mike silently urged the ‘medic to take up the offer, and his luck was in, because the guy nodded. “It’s worth a try.”


	18. Chapter 18

Martin was finding it difficult to concentrate, despite the fact that the pretty paramedic had promised him that she hadn’t been able to find any bumps on his head. So it was probably just the hypothermia. Or the pain medication. Or Arthur.

Probably Arthur.

Arthur had perked up considerably once Martin had begun trying to answer, negotiating a compromise of “Skipper” rather than “Captain” for the paramedic, since this really wasn’t a formal occasion, and introducing her as Marimba. Martin was pretty sure that was a musical instrument. Or a snake. Or a dance. Or something.

“He’s not teasing you,” Martin had tried to explain, even though it came out more like “‘snot teezinu” because he couldn’t lift his head off the ground and talking was almost more work than it was worth. “Heez jus’ ‘rthur.” And she had smiled and said she was used to it, and that they could just call her Mariam if they liked, which Arthur thought was brilliant.

“Yr v’ry pr’feshnul,” Martin added once the Valium kicked in.. “Ree’shurin.” He thought she should know, and not having to bite his lip to keep from saying things one shouldn’t say in front of young ladies made it possible to say as much, even if the young lady in question kept cutting away at his clothing and running her hands along his body. 

Bit by bit, as the cold water went away, Mariam had been getting Martin ready to be moved. Besides the pain medicines, he had an oxygen cannula under his nose, and an IV in his arm, and had warmed up enough to start shivering. She’d even squirmed down alongside him until her head was down in the water so she could try to feel for a pulse in his ankle. That had hurt, which was good, because it meant that the ankle was still attached, and it had been scary too, until the other paramedics hauled her back by her heels and she’d come up gasping but pleased.

“Skipper... Martin.... Captain!” The tap against his cheek told him that he’d been woolgathering.

He smiled as best he could one-sided. “S’ry. ‘M tired. ‘S long day.”

“I know, but try to stay with us a little longer. Tell me the times table or something.”

“‘S boring.” she couldn’t really want him to talk about maths? “C’n’t “thur t’ll you?”

“Arthur’s going to be busy for a bit,” she said, and Martin realized that he could actually wriggle the fingers on his right hand again.

“B’zee?”

“Thor’s going to lift and he and Henry are going to brace so nothing comes back down on top of us. And I’m meant to be keeping an eye on your level of consciousness, which will be a lot easier if you’re talking to me.”

She sounded nervous for some reason. Martin couldn’t think why, but he was willing to be cooperative if it meant that the hurting and confusion would go away. Just not that cooperative. “T’mz t’bles st’ll b’ring.” And for once in his life he didn’t want to talk about aviation. Not when the only statistics that wanted to come into his head were about the body count of various disasters.

Mariam arranged herself beside him, so close that he could smell soap and a spicy echo of cassava leaf stew. “So tell me something interesting,” she said, pulling a tarpaulin over them both and positioning her arm so that it was braced in the way of anything that might want to come down onto his head. “Tell me how you came to meet someone like Thor.”


	19. Chapter 19

Jack had warned her that the temporary stability she’d been fighting for for her patient would vanish once they moved the wreckage, but Mariam hadn’t expected the wreckage to vanish too. In retrospect it made sense. Airplanes were made to fly, after all, and once the blade of metal that had gone into the ground mere millimeters from Martin’s right hip snapped, there wasn’t anything anchoring the rest of the stuff against the wind. She’d barely managed to hang onto Martin, nevermind the tarp, and the sudden exposure to the full fury of the storm had her gasping for air almost as much as it did Martin. 

She blinked the rain away furiously. Martin, freed of the constrictions that had kept him from moving for far too long, was spasming and swearing in a high pitched voice, tears mingling with the rain. Reluctantly, she held him in place a little longer, giving Jack a chance to splint the leg she was sure was broken “in position” to minimize any further damage. Henry was meant to be bringing over the stretcher, but he was on the ground, clutching his right arm to his chest and grimacing, with Arthur fluttering over him. It was Thor who knelt opposite her and placed a huge gentle hand on Martin’s back, waiting for Jack to give permission for the next step. 

Mariam scrambled up to her knees, looking for the IV bag and making sure that the oxygen tank was still connected to the cannula. Everything that was supposed to be attached to the patient was still attached, thanks to lots of tape, and her stomach unclenched. With Thor doing the comforting, she could shift down to help Jack with the leg, being the extra hand to keep everything from flying off or being washed away before he could secure it. Jack wrapped the other leg against the splinted one, as a precaution, and finally signalled that they were ready to turn Martin over and lift him to the stretcher. With Henry out of commission that meant leaving Thor to help Jack while Mariam scrambled over to figure out how to undo the knotted strap which they’d jury-rigged as a leash to an inset runway light to keep the stretcher from blowing away. 

The camera guy was following her every move. She would have yelled at him, except that the big light on top of the camera was making it easier to see. When had it got so dark? And whose bright idea had it been to tie the knot so tight? She got out her bandage scissors again.

Back to the patient, fighting the stretcher every inch of the way, and then when she got there she wasn’t sure how she’d keep it from blowing over. The camera guy surprised her by reaching down to grab the an end with one hand, even though he never stopped filming. Jack and Thor had rolled Martin over, were ready to lift. Her jacket was trying to escape, billowing out from under Thor’s knee, and she put the oxygen tank on it before she got into position to help lift. She didn’t have the money to pay for losing it, and she didn’t have the time to chase it if it got blown away.

Martin’s eyes were closed, his breathing was too shallow, and he wasn’t getting any O2 if he was breathing through his mouth anyway. She spared a hand to tip his chin up, closing his mouth, and got no protest. Had he fainted? Might be a mercy. Jack was doing the countdown.

Ready? _Lift!_


	20. Chapter 20

Henry stumbled along in the wake of the stretcher bearers, applying as much pressure as he could to the ten-inch gash that a sharp corner of the debris had opened up along his forearm as it was whipped up and away by the wind. It was deep enough for stitches, and leaking like a faucet, and he’d have to admit how bad it was as soon as they got to the ambulance. 

The civvy airline steward was sticking close, only darting away to help with the stretcher when they had to cross the instant streambed that Thor had dug to divert away the water from the rescue. Jack wanted to keep the patient level, which precluded having Thor just pick up stretcher and all and carry it across, but as soon as they had the stretcher wheels on flat pavement he’d been happy to let Arthur come back to Henry. In fact, he’d insisted on it, which meant Henry’s stoic act wasn’t playing very well.

But if he was going to have to get help from a civilian, it might as well be someone who was completely oblivious to any damage he was doing to Henry’s dignity. 

“I hope Mum’s all right,” Arthur said fretfully, as he practically lifted Henry across the hazard with a firm grip on the arm that didn’t have a shredded sleeve. “I don’t see the bus that she was on anymore.”

Henry unclenched his jaw. “Doesn’t she have a mobile?”

“Oh, yes,” Arthur brightened. “Yes, of course. Good thinking that. I can call her on my mobile.”

“From the ambulance?” Henry suggested when it looked like Arthur was going to stop and act like an anchor while he sorted through his pockets for his phone. The ambulance was only another few meters off, thank god. Jack and Bah were already transferring the patient inside.

“Oh. Oh, yes,” Arthur promptly dragged him the rest of the way. They sheltered in the lee of the vehicle until the others were done setting up, and Henry had a first row seat as Arthur discovered that his mobile reception was terrible. “It’s not working!” Arthur held the phone out to Henry. “See?”

Maybe it wasn’t working for calls, but there were texts in the queue. Henry pointed them out to Arthur, and leaned his head back, eyes closed, waiting for Jack to come and do something about his arm.


	21. Chapter 21

HI MUM R U OK

YES ARTHUR WHERE ARE YOU

FITTON

FITTON HOSPITAL

NO HERE

WHERE IS HERE

FITTON

WHICH PART OF FITTON ARE YOU AT THE HOSPITAL

NO MUM IM HERE

STILL

WITH SKIPPER HERE

YOU ARENT AT THE HOSPITAL YET

WE JUST GOT 2 THE AMBLUANCE

AMBULANCE

IS MARTIN ALL RIGHT

NO

DETAILS ARTHUR HOW IS MARTIN NOT ALL RIGHT

I THINK HIS LEG IS BROKN

WHICH HOSPITAL ARE YOU GOING TO

NO ONE HAS TOLD ME

ASK

MARIMBA SAYS UNIV HOSP COVENTRY SKIPS LEGS DEFNTLY BRKN

I SEE

TEXT TONYSTARK TO MEET YOU THERE

YES MUM BYE


	22. Chapter 22

Jack ran through his mental checklist one more time before slamming the ambulance door and rapping it twice to signal that everything was “go”. It wasn’t like he could go too. There was no room, not with Mariam and Henry in the back with the patient and Arthur riding shotgun up front. And in any case, there was still a disaster to cope with.

 _They’ll be fine_. Deliberately, Jack turned to secure his equipment. Henry had refused pain medication so he could stay clearheaded until the hospital and Bah - Mariam - had shown herself to be both steadyhanded and smart. She’d switched the patient from plain oxygen to a rebreather the moment she’d had access to one, and taken Jack’s question as if it were part of her training exam, rattling off statistics about the dangers of hyperoxia with a confidence that was going to have Jack doing some research the minute he got back to a computer and a cup of coffee.

The light he’d been working by dimmed and failed and Jack looked up. The camera guy was telling his radio something about batteries. And Thor... Thor was still there, watching the ambulance as it negotiated its way past obstacles and wobbled in the crosswind.

 _That’s right. He wouldn’t have fit either_. Jack stood and hefted the drug box in one hand and the fracture kit in the other, wondering what he should say. The giant acknowledged his presence with a nod, but did not look down. “I have tasted the fragility of mortals, if only for a few scant days,” he said, in a quiet voice that somehow defied the howling of the wind. “I cannot say I enjoyed it.”

“If he were fragile,” Jack said, “He wouldn’t have lasted long enough to be rescued. But we got to him in time.”

Thor shrugged. “On Asgard, we would fetch healing stones, and all would be mended in a matter of hours. Here you heal so slowly.”

“We do what we can.”

“But did I do what _I_ can?”

“Thor,” Jack wasn’t going to let a superhero waste time on angst. Not right now.. “If it weren’t for you we’d still be trying to get him out. You helped tremendously. And you can still help. There may be other people out there.”

Thor nodded. “Yes, Healer” he said, looking down at Jack, “ _Yes_. There is much still to do.”


	23. Chapter 23

Tony Stark hated flying blind. The video lifeline he’d been watching for so long had vanished, and cryptic text exchanges with Arthur weren’t much of a substitute. He had figured out that they were taking Martin to the trauma center in Coventry, but Arthur’s idea of a progress report was “PSSD BG OK CRZY GLF” which even JARVIS couldn’t make any sense out of. 

Tony bit back a sigh. What was the point of having built the most advanced AI outside of science fiction if you couldn’t find out what you wanted to know when you wanted to know it?

He was getting close enough to England now that pretty soon he’d have to descend into the storm clouds and the sunset rushing westwards to meet him. He remembered Mafikeng, and being all off-hand and shit when Martin said that he knew Iron Man could fly through storms, but Tony had never explained how much work that was; that flying in a storm was like crossing a river at high water, fighting the current all the way, depending on the heads up display, and hoping that you’d miss any passing lightning bolts. Flying through storms sucked.

Flying blind sucked more.


	24. Chapter 24

Lights.

_Pain_

Motion.

_Nausea._

Voices.

_Confusion._

Flickers of consciousness left shards of sense-images on Martin’s mind. The smell of antiseptics. The aftertaste of vomit. The sound of tannoy announcements, tinged with urgency. The touch of hands, peeling away the shell of his clothes. A dark face, interposed between his eyes and the too bright lights that patchworked an unfamiliar ceiling, the mouth moving, the eyes concerned.

The tap of fingers against his cheek in a signal that he’d somehow come to know meant he must concentrate. _Focus._

“Captain Crieff? Skipper? I have to go.”

_No! Please! Don’t leave me alone!_


	25. Chapter 25

“Easy, easy. You won’t be alone. There’s lots of people here to take care of you, I promise.”

Mariam wondered if it would always feel like this. If she would always find the elation of having truly helped tempered by the realization that she must walk away once the trauma team took over. Or was it only because this was the first time, her first real patient, someone who had depended on her to know more and do more than the siblings and cousins who had come to her with scraped knees ever since she was tall enough to reach the first aid supplies?

“He’ll answer to Martin, but he responds best to ‘Captain’,” she told the nurse who was taking down the details on the paperwork, once the line between Martin’s eyebrows had faded again. “Don’t call him Mister Crieff.” She was worried by the way that he kept fading in and out, but she knew she’d best grab the chance to leave while he was mostly unconscious.

“Got it,” the nurse said, and tossed a smile in Mariam’s direction. “Sure you don’t want to grab a shower before you head back out?”

“I’d just get all muddy again,” Mariam answered, although it was clear that the question had been rote courtesy. The nurse’s attention (‘Baxter’ read the name tag) was on Martin, where it should be, on the patient, not the ambulance attendant whose job it was to go back out there and fetch back another set of problems to be faced. By the time Mariam made paramedic, they’d know each other better, might even be friends, but even in that future time Mariam imagined that Baxter would ask about the shower and Mariam would tell her no, and neither of them would think that cold and muddy should trump hypothermic and hurt.

Carefully, she extracted the folds of her jacket from Martin’s loosening grasp so that she could back away from the gurney, giving place to the orderlies who were lurking with towels and sponges, soap and betadine. They’d finish the job of getting him clean, prep him for the central line and catheter and all the rest. There’d be a surgery, no doubt. Mariam didn’t have to wait for the x-ray to arrive to see that Martin’s left thigh had swollen inside the splint. God knew when, though. Casualties filled every cubicle in the trauma center, some of them worse off. Very worse off, by the smell. Mariam was sure it would be a long time before she would want to eat barbecued meat. 

For a moment she thought about taking Baxter up on that shower and then walking away, going back to London. But no, she’d signed up for the job and and damn it all, it was a job that needed to be done. Determinedly she slipped out through the curtains of Martin’s cubicle. 

A strange man with a camera stepped forward. “Miss Bah?” he said, extending a hand. “My name is Tom Young.”


	26. Chapter 26

Tom Young found himself wishing that he’d kept one of the pictures of Tony Stark and his boyfriend on his camera. Just one. If only to prove to the very stubborn young lady in front of him that he really was just trying to pass along word about Martin Crieff’s condition to the billionaire so that he could start concentrating on the dozens of other stories unfolding around them.

“I’m sorry,” Mariam said again. “It’s a violation of his privacy, and in any case, as far as I know no one has notified his next of kin that he’s been injured yet. That comes first.”

Tom latched on to that tidbit. “Don’t you know who his next of kin is?” he asked, strategically. If Martin were fully conscious, he’d have told them.

But Mariam shook her head. “I know who to ask. I think.” She craned up to look past Tom’s shoulder, frowning when she didn’t see who she was looking for. “If he’s still here.” She started and walking and Tom trailed along behind her.

“I’ll bet I can find out sooner than you can,” Tom took his phone out and began composing. “And if I do?”

“We’ll talk.”


	27. Chapter 27

As far as Tony was concerned, the words “Don’t panic, but...” constituted the worst advice ever given. When followed by “I need the name of MC’s next of kin” they were guaranteed to leave your stomach fluttering and your mouth dry. At least, they would if you weren’t an artificial intelligence blessedly bereft of anatomy. JARVIS’s answer (where the hell was Wokingham?) was already scrolling past on the HUD when Tony managed to say something, and the AI obediently added a “WTF” to the end of the text.

This deep into the storm, with the signal having to fight both ways, even Stark tech was having trouble, so Tony didn’t expect a fast reply. Which was good, because it was a full minute before the next text popped up.

“No info release to press w/out permission. Rules.”

 _Right. Right._ Tony should have expected that. Could have figured it out if he was thinking. Which he needed to start doing again, because there was going to be a shitstorm of publicity when he showed up at the hospital for Martin. Especially since he wasn’t even sure if Martin had told his parents - no, parent, he’d inherited the van and the ring - shit, Tony wasn’t sure if “Wendy Crieff” was Martin’s mom or his sister. _How the hell have we never talked about families? Well, your family anyway since mine are dead. Is that why? Or is it just because it’s more fun to talk about planes and tech and sex and..._

A new text. “Possible broken femur, hypothermia, shock.” And another. “ETA query?”

JARVIS answered that one too. Thirty three minutes, because the wind kept trying to drive the suit off course. On a clear day he’d have been touching down on the hospital roof in twenty. 

_Soon, Martin. Soon._


	28. Chapter 28

“Here you go, Pepper,” Steve Rogers was holding a cup of coffee between the CEO of Stark Industries and the holograms she’d been juggling for the best part of three hours. 

Pepper blinked, re-focussed, and leaned back to rub a hand across her face before reaching up to take the cup. “Thanks, Steve.”

“Anything else I can do to help?”

She pulled a face. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go knock some heads together? Or at least go down and look disappointed at the board until they decide they can live without fussing at Tony in person for another week or two.” She sighed. “I swear, some of them are still sure that they can convince him to going back to manufacturing weapons.”

Steve patted her on the shoulder. From anyone else it would have been patronizing, but in this case it was just Steve. “I’ll straighten them out,” he promised and headed for the elevator like a man on a mission.

Pepper took a sip of coffee and squashed any misgivings about siccing an Avenger on the recalcitrant fusspots who whined at her every time the stock market trembled. Sure, the bottom line had taken a hit when SI extracted itself from most of the military contracts, but Tony’s aviation innovations and sustainable energy work had already made back most of the difference, the board was just going to have to learn to like it or quit. Pepper’s job title might have changed, but keeping Tony’s world running smoothly was still in the job description as far as she was concerned. 

Well, as smoothly as circumstances would allow.

“JARVIS?” The AI could hold multiple conversations simultaneously, but seldom did, and Pepper always thought he sounded a little distracted if she was trying to access him while he was shepherding Tony in the suit on the other side of the planet. “Is Tony on the ground yet?”

“Not quite, Miss Potts,” said JARVIS. “But he has landed on the hospital roof, and is within range of a WiFi transmitter, so direct communication should be feasible once more.”

“Put me on.” One of the holograms changed, showing her face next to Tony’s. He looked tense, and his eyes were flicking from corner to corner of the HUD, looking at things she could only see as reflections of light on his face.

“What’s up, Pep?”

“Thought you might like some updates,” she said. 

“Okay, hit me.” He was moving, but listening, so she reached for her notes.

“We got through to Martin’s mother, and an SI car from London will be taking her to Coventry as soon the storm allows. Carolyn and Douglas are in the hospital at Fitton. She says she’s fine; Douglas has a mild concussion. She’s concerned about Arthur. As far as we know he’s at Coventry, but his phone is no longer accepting texts or calls. Martin is in the trauma center, and Mrs Crieff has authorized them to tell you and me about his condition, but the doctor in charge hasn’t contacted either of us yet, which isn’t surprising considering how many patients have been brought in there. There are power outages all over the Midlands, and downed trees making travel difficult, even for ambulances.”

“The power is out here too,” Tony said. “The hospital’s on generators.”

“Thor is still at the Fitton airport, helping with the rescue efforts. They could use more help, if you get the chance.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Tony said. “Send them some coffee and donuts, in the meantime.”

“Got it,” she made a note. “Good luck, Tony.”


	29. Chapter 29

Tony walked along the roof until he found an emergency stair door. It was locked from the inside, and he really couldn’t afford to break it down, given the wind-driven rain, but neither did he want to just fly down to the main entrance and walk in like he wanted to be the center of attention. He was still working out a way to break in without damaging the door when it suddenly opened and a raincoated man waved him in. 

Once inside, Tony flicked on the helmet light to supplement the dim shadows cast by the emergency lighting system so he could see who had let him in. It was Young, looking impatient. “I was interviewing someone,” he said irritably. “Couldn’t you have just come in the front door?”

“How did you even know I was up here?” Tony said, activating the suit release.

“Are you kidding? Your flunky called me!”

“I’m not a flunky,” JARVIS announced. “Except perhaps metaphorically.” With Tony half in and half out of the suit, JARVIS’s voice sounded very odd. 

Young blinked. “Who’s that?” he asked, suddenly uncertain.

“JARVIS,” Tony said. “My AI.”

“AI?”

“Like a computer program, only moreso.” Tony couldn’t help but feel a little smug. He loved it when JARVIS made a big impression. He let the suit close up though, before he added, “JARVIS, say ‘hello’ to the nice man.”

“Hello, Mr. Young,” JARVIS obliged. “Thank you for facilitating our access to the building.”

“You’re welcome,” Young said automatically. ‘Uhm. Are you, er, both coming downstairs?”

“Just me,” Tony said. “It’s kind of hard to be discreet when you’re big and shiny red-and-gold. And I’m sure the doctors don’t need the distraction. Although I’ll give you an interview if you want one.”

“I thought you didn’t want publicity,” Young said, leading the way down the stairs. “I thought that that’s why you had Jarvis call me.”

“That was JARVIS’s idea,” Tony admitted, following along. “And yeah, I’m not thrilled about the idea of having Martin’s name splashed all over the gossip columns, but how am I going to avoid it and still be able to be there for him? And besides, I owe you and Barrow one, big time, for letting me know what was going on.”

Young stopped and looked up at him. “Your computer called me without you knowing it would?”

Tony shrugged. “Essentially. I was trying to work out how to get through the door without leaving the building vulnerable to wind damage.” And trying to work up the nerve to go inside, although that had to do more with it being a hospital than anything else. Even in the stairs Tony could smell the hospital smell of too much disinfectant and too many sick people. “Getting someone to haul themselves up all the flights and open it was on the list.”

“Oh,” Young said, accepting that, which was good, because as much as he didn’t want Martin’s name in the papers, he didn’t want JARVIS’s full capabilities in the papers either. “I see. Well, I guess I don’t mind.”

Tony gave him a grin. It wasn’t his best grin, given that he was still pretty anxious about Martin, and he knew that he still had helmet-head from being in the suit before his hair had had a chance to dry. “You’re the strangest reporter I’ve ever met.” Most press guys Tony had encountered would have leaped at the chance to get an interview about Tony’s boyfriend and not even thought to ask about JARVIS.

Young shrugged. “I told you, I write about bike routes, and council meetings. Traffic accidents. Things that affect people’s real lives. I’m a little out of my depth when it comes to gossip. Drew’s the one you want for celebrities and VIPs.” His fingers shifted on his camera. “Would you be okay if I took pictures, though? Same as Duxford, I’ll let you see them first.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, thinking about the kind of pictures this man had caught of him and Martin on one of the best days of his life. Fuck, it wasn’t even a week ago and it already felt like a precious memory. “Yeah, I’m good with that.”


	30. Chapter 30

Jenny Baxter tried to make the most of the necessity of in-putting the stats for the patients in bay four and nine. Her tea had gone cold sometime after the third ambulance had pulled in from Fitton, but it hadn’t been spilled, and that was the important part. Also the sitting. Sitting mattered too, when you didn’t see much chance of leaving work for hours yet, and you were meant to have gone home twenty minutes past. It was a good job that her kids were old enough not to fret on the occasions when she wound up working a double shift. Although she should probably try to find a minute when she could call and remind her youngest to go to sleep instead of staying up to watch the rain all night. 

She put down her tea and made herself concentrate on the numbers she was typing, but the American voice behind her made it difficult.

“Excuse me,” (Male, adult, used to being answered.) “Is there someone here who can tell me about a patient’s condition?”

“You can ask at admitting, sir.” Jenny asked, without turning away from her work.

“I did. They sent me here.”

It didn’t sound like a lie, and Jenny glanced over her shoulder, looked back at the screen, and then found herself doing a classic doubletake. “Are you...?”

“Yes.” His beard needed trimming, and his shirt looked two sizes too large, but there was no mistaking the carefully calculated charm. “I’d like to find out about Martin Crieff, please. He was brought in from Fitton a little while ago. Broken leg, half-drowned in mud...” He bit his lip as if to stop himself from speaking, and Jenny recognized the genuine worry in his eyes.

“One moment please.” Jenny called up the chart and saw that someone had appended a note (not five minutes ago) giving Tony Stark and Pepper Potts permission from Wendy Crieff to be included in any discussion concerning her son. Stark leaned over in a blatant attempt to read the screen, but he was at the wrong angle. 

“I’d show you my ID,” he said. “But I’m afraid I left it in New York when I heard about the crash. I’ve got the suit sitting upstairs, though, if you need to establish my bona fides.”

He really did look worried. And getting answers to Jenny’s questions (had he really just flown all that way?) wouldn’t give him the answers to his. “I’ll see if the Doctor is available,” she said, “But it might be a while.”

“Could I see Martin?” Stark asked. “Or at least Arthur?”

“Arthur?” Jenny frowned. “Who’s Arthur?”

“Arthur Shappey. He should be with Martin.”

Jenny shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see anyone come in with Captain Crieff. And we’re still trying to get him stable enough to be moved upstairs. He’s been somewhat agitated.”

“I can calm him down.” Stark seemed awfully sure of himself. “Please?”

“All right,” Jenny said. It was worth a try.


	31. Chapter 31

_He wasn’t sure which nightmare this was anymore. It wasn’t the one where he’d forgotten to put on his clothes, although he was fairly certain that he wasn’t wearing any. He didn’t want it to be the one where he panicked mid-flight and one of the junior cadets had to land the airplane for him because he hadn’t dreamt that in years and besides, he was fairly certain that it hadn’t ever happened anymore than the dream where he was driving and the brakes refused to work no matter how hard he pressed down upon the pedal. And it wasn’t the one where he was suddenly deaf, although by the unsteady undertone of nausea and the sensation of someone grinding a dull spike into the side of his head he was going to wake up with yet another ear infection._

_Please god it wasn’t the one where he crashed the plane. Please god it was only a nightmare and he hadn’t crashed the plane. Please god he was only imagining the moans and the smell and the pain._

“Martin?” Tony didn’t like the way that Martin kept flinching his head to the left, like he was trying to get away from something on the right. He also didn’t like the way that someone had decided to use restraints, but he could see how the overloaded trauma team might vote on keeping Martin from pulling out all the tubes they’d attached by tying down his wrists over sitting beside him constantly. But mostly, he didn’t like that Martin didn’t seem to have heard him, even though by the way his face was scrunched up he wasn’t really asleep.

Tony worked his way around to the side of the bed, got ahold of Martin’s hand with one hand and used the other to gently run through Martin’s hair. He leaned closer, so that he wouldn’t need to raise his voice to get past whatever was keeping Martin inside his own head. “C’mon, Spitfire. It’s me, Tony. Can you hear me?”

_Tony? But Tony was in America, saving people from Doctor Doom and jellyfish things. Or was that the other nightmare with Tony lying limp in the Hulk’s arms, a dreadful pietà seen on a screen that he couldn’t reach through, couldn’t call through, couldn’t ever see past..._

“Open your eyes, babe. It can’t be worse out here than it is in there.”


	32. Chapter 32

Jenny held herself in readiness to intervene if it proved that Tony Stark’s presence was not helping the patient, but after a few dicey moments she relaxed. Crieff was tightening his fingers around the hand that Stark had placed in his and his restless shifting had become a comfort-seeking nudging toward the hand that Stark rested against his head. She couldn’t hear what the billionaire was murmuring; not from her position at the foot of the bed, but he’d got the patient to open his eyes intermittently, and summon up a brief grimace that might, if it hadn’t been for the rebreather mask, almost resemble a smile.

She flipped back the blanket to check the capillary refill and distal pulse on both legs since she was standing there anyway, and earned a muffled protest from the patient. Stark turned his head to watch, his dark eyes somehow both intense and distant, as if he were measuring far off possibilities. She made herself look at what she was doing, watching with professional satisfaction as the nailbeds she’d pressed turned from white to pink. With the ice packs around the suspected femur injury she couldn’t depend on a difference of temperature to indicate if the injury had worsened, but for now, at least, it seemed that the traction splint was doing its job.

She put the blanket back down over the patient’s toes and would have gone back to the desk if it hadn’t been that Stark had straightened as much as he could without moving his hands and was jerking his head in a “come here” gesture. She stepped closer, and he asked, in a low voice, “Any chance of boosting whatever anti-nausea meds you’ve got him on? He’d be more comfortable. And have you done anything about his ears yet?”


	33. Chapter 33

_Tony was there, which was good because it meant that this wasn’t a nightmare. Tony didn’t show up in nightmares, except maybe once the no-clothes thing and that had promptly ceased to be a nightmare because Tony plus no-clothes wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone ever was going to have nightmares about except maybe Captain America, who Martin was pretty sure didn’t want to think about it. But Tony was there, which was bad, because if it wasn’t a nightmare then the only other thing left for everything to be was real and Martin was pretty sure he remembered thinking that he should let Douglas take the landing. In fact, thinking that he ought to let Douglas take the landing was the last thing he really could remember with any clarity at all, and even that was confused, as if he remembered it dozens of times instead of only once; like his mental record player had skipped a needle on a cracked LP, playing the same bit of tune over and over again. Not that he never did think that Douglas should take the landing, it was just that usually his pride got in the way and besides he needed the practice because if he didn’t ever get the practice how was he going to land the plane without cr..._

_No. Tony. Concentrate on Tony. Tony, who was telling someone about the time that they’d gone skinny dipping in the ocean and Martin had gone into the water wearing nothing but sun block and earplugs. Which was worth blushing over, except that it was nice to think about because Tony hadn’t worn any swim trunks either, even though he could have seeing as how it was at Malibu and his house was just up a few stairs and knowing Tony he had dozens of trunks in drawers somewhere, but somehow neither of them had thought about that when they’d decided to go into the water, and it was good that Martin had been wearing his uniform because he always had his earplugs when he had his uniform on because you had to protect your ears on the flight line with all the noise from the ground vehicles and clatter of prop engines and the whine of jet engines because if you didn’t protect your ears you wouldn’t be able to hear and then you’d miss something important and probably cr..._

_Tony. Think about Tony. Tony who was meant to be in America, and was here, holding Martin’s hand while a strange lady, middle-aged and round and pale (not young and slender and dark?), ran her hands gently over his head, making his ear hurt even while she put in the eardrops that he knew would help because eardrops always helped when he got water in his ears and there had been water, hadn’t there, and mud and Arthur rambling on about ships and shoes and sealing wax in a shouty helpful voice and holding Martin’s hand because he couldn’t move and he couldn’t move and he couldn’t move because because because because and Tony had come and Tony had come and Tony had come and why would Tony come if it weren’t for the nightmare and it wasn’t a nightmare it wasn’t a nightmare and oh god oh god oh god..._

_He made himself open his eyes. Made himself look at Tony, who wasn’t meant to ever look like that, with his hair flattened and his eyes worried and his smile so strained. But Martin had to know and he trusted Tony, trusted him with his heart and his life and everything but his goddamned pride and was oh god going to have to trust him now with the shame the shame but who else could he ask and he needed to know._

“How many?” he croaked, and his throat hurt, and Tony bent closer and the nurse slipped off the mask that was on Martin’s face so he could be heard so Martin asked again. “How many?”

“How many what, Martin?” Tony asked, his eyes so close that they had to shift from one of Martin’s eyes to the other.

“How many people are dead because of me?”


	34. Chapter 34

“Nobody,” Tony said, and hoped that Martin would put down his brief hesitation to being confused at the question and not remembering that stupid fireman ranting at Arthur (and especially not remembering those first few horrible days in the cave in Afghanistan, and wondering the same thing). “Nobody,” he said again, more certainly, to make sure he’d said it so Martin could hear.

“But the plane... broken... I must have landed wrong...”

“You were already on the ground,” Tony said, happy to be on firmer ground. “Somebody else crashed a plane on top of you.”

“How can... how do you know?” The stuff the nurse had given Martin for the nausea was working, because he’d stopped swallowing so much, but Tony could feel the tension growing as Martin fought to wake up, trying to focus just when he ought to be letting the pain meds keep him wrapped in cotton batting. He wanted - _needed_ \- proof that he hadn’t screwed up before he could relax, and Tony couldn’t give it to him.

Or maybe he could. He unclipped the communicator from his ear. “JARVIS, can you tell Martin that he didn’t crash the plane? Just speak up a little, because I can’t actually put the earpiece in his ear.”

“Of course sir.” JARVIS’s voice was faint, but perfectly audible, even a few inches from the earbug. Tony held it closer to Martin’s head, opposite from the sore side. “Captain Crieff, your aeroplane arrived at Fitton without incident nine minutes and forty seven seconds before the communications from the field were cut off. Within the next two minutes, I was able to monitor your call to the authorities, requesting assistance.”

“And a minute later, I was on my way here,” Tony said. “But the suit doesn’t do much better than mach 2.”


	35. Chapter 35

Tom knew, in the part of his mind that wasn’t a photographer, that there were places in the world where cameras weren’t welcome. Scenes which were not just compositions of light and shadow. Indignities that once made immortal would continue to sting. But the world through the viewfinder spoke to the other part of him, the part that knew he’d been granted permission to look and see and record a face now revealing an aspect virgin of imagery despite all the paparazzi in the world. Knew that his subject had forgotten Tom existed. Forgotten he was observed by anyone but the person he loved. Tom watched, and listened as the man he’d thought of as less than newsworthy, as somehow less than _real_ , abandoned every pretension, every mask, for the sake of soothing away the worst of his lover’s fears. Watched, and listened as the man in the bed took comfort from his touch. Not even at Duxford had they looked like this.

There was no way to take a picture of Tony Stark Human Being without including the pain and confusion on Martin Crieff’s face. Tom knew that, and took the shot anyway. 

He could always photoshop it later.


	36. Chapter 36

Arthur roused himself from the doze his body had insisted upon once it was warm and dry and relatively safe. He sat up on the exam table and rubbed his eyes, pulling a face when his bruises and scrapes fussed at him for moving. The nice nurse-lady who had taken his muddy wet things away hadn’t come back yet with the clothes she’d promised, and since he’d forgotten to take his mobile out of his pocket he wasn’t sure how long she’d been gone. Arthur sighed and fidgeted, wondering how much longer it would be. This was kind of boring.


	37. Chapter 37

It didn’t take very long to calm Martin down. It never did, once Tony got ahold of him, although not being able to kiss properly attenuated the effect. And Martin’s confusion over what had happened even after Tony’s explanations didn’t help much. (Not that Tony had any intention of ragging Martin about that. He still didn’t remember parts about Afghanistan, and it wasn’t because he’d hit his head.) But Martin did calm down, and being Martin it wasn’t when the nurse tried to tell him that everything was going to be fine, but when Tony told him that he didn’t need to worry about MJN Air, because the commissions were still going to happen, and the maintenance, even if it meant rebuilding GERTI from the ground up, because Tony liked fixing old cars and why not fix an old plane? It’d give them something to mess around with while they were waiting for Martin’s leg to heal up.

“I’d rather mess around with you,” Martin said with a faint smile.

“We’ll do that too,” Tony promised. “But in the meantime you’ve gotta be good and tell the medical types when you’re hurting so they can do something about it.”

Martin’s eyes drifted closed, although he wasn’t asleep. “I don’t want to be a bother,” he mumbled, a faint line appearing between his eyebrows.

“It’s not bothering anybody,” Tony said, knowing somewhere Bruce Banner was probably laughing his ass off at the words coming out of Tony’s mouth. “It’s giving them the data they need to make good decisions. Think of it like a weather report and you’re the guy with the weather station. The docs can’t file a flight plan without knowing about current conditions.”

One eye opened to gaze at him skeptically. “Isn’t that.” Martin took a while to think about the rest of the sentence. “Stretching the metaphor?”

“Naw. It’s tailoring it to suit the audience.” Martin was awake enough that Tony could run one hand over everything that didn’t look broken, and just out of it enough he didn’t care that anyone was watching. Convincing him that he hadn’t crashed an airplane was like snipping the wire that was holding him up, only in a good way. Tamping down the nausea and dealing with the ear had helped too. And in any case, Martin was clearly exhausted. (Tony remembered that too, the way his body had craved sleep, whether or not he was afraid to dream.)

“The doctor’s here,” the nurse said as she gave way on her side of the bed for a guy in surgical scrubs. Tony looked him over, trying to keep any misgivings off his face for Martin’s sake, even though the kid had him thinking more Doogie Howser than Marcus Welby. 

“I’m Dr Robinson,” he said, as he tugged a stethoscope out of his pocket. “Are you the next of kin?”

“Not exactly,” Tony began, just as Martin said, “Yes. Yes, if it means you won’t make him go away then _yes_.”


	38. Chapter 38

Will Robinson (and yes, he’d heard all the jokes, thank you, but he didn’t want to go by “Bill” because that was his dad, and he already had enough trouble getting treated like an adult to go by “Billy” or “Willie”) deciphered his patient’s slurred protest with the ease of four years practice in the trauma unit. He used a touch on (what was the name on the chart? Crieff, Martin Captain?) the man’s shoulder to keep him from trying to push up off the pillow. “I’ll make sure he’s on the authorized visitor’s list,” he promised. “I just need to go over what’s happening with you, okay?” And with the friend (boyfriend?) who felt ridiculously familiar, even if Will didn’t have the brainpower to spare on why just yet.

Crieff nodded. “Yes,” he whispered, the white-lines on his knuckles fading toward pink. Will had gone over this with him before, and expected to do it again, but that was typical with hypothermia patients. At least this time Crieff was a little more _compos mentis_.

“The x-ray revealed a crack in your left femur. Your right leg has some heavy bruising, and I know you probably feel the other damage, but it’s only scrapes and minor lacerations, and should heal without trouble.” He tugged the hospital gown down a little so he could place the bell of the stethoscope directly against skin as he checked the lungs. It was an inefficient way of checking to see how warm someone was, but Will had discovered in medical school that he did a better job of assessing patients with some tactile input. “You were hypothermic when you were brought in, but we’ve been working on that. Do you still feel cold?”

“Just my leg.”

Will nodded, but didn’t answer, absorbed in what he was hearing from the man’s lungs. “Cough please,” he ordered, and wasn’t entirely surprised (or happy) when the first cough led to a series. Between them, he and the boyfriend got the patient sitting up a little more, which not only eased the cough, but gave Will access to his back to listen some more. He was having doubts about the lower left lobe, and a glance at the oximeter showed the blood O2 dropping into the low 90s. Will reached for the rebreather mask to get it back into place as they resettled the patient against the pillows. 

“Go easy around his ears,” Boyfriend advised, reaching over to adjust the strap a little higher. Will checked the chart and saw a note about a possible otitis, which, judging from the way that the patient was pulling away from any contact against the ear was all too likely to be the cherry on top of the broken femur and incipient aspiration pneumonia.

 _Wonderful._ But not fatal. And with patients still arriving from the disaster, not something that was going to bump Mr Crieff up in the line for surgery. Will just hoped he’d understand why he’d have to wait.


	39. Chapter 39

Tony listened as the doctor explained that Martin would probably not have the surgery to fix his leg for another day or more, and wanted to break something. Or drink something. Or do something. 

“Is that really the best plan for Martin?” he finally got out, and nearly politely too.

Robinson shrugged. “We’re not working under ideal conditions,” he said. “Between the storm and the disaster we’ve had nearly a hundred patients through here and I know for a fact there are another four ambulances on the way. I’ve got too many cases that need immediate surgery just to stay alive, and no way of knowing how many more are going to show up, because they’re still searching for survivors at Fitton. It’s a matter of triage, Mister...”

“Stark. Tony Stark.” Robinson’s eyes widened a little when Tony invoked the name, but if anything, the younger man only stiffened his resolve, even if he did swallow hard before going on.

“My boss will tell you the same thing. And try to look on the bright side. The delay gives us a chance to clear up any infection in his lungs, and means that when he does get operated on it will be by a surgical team that’s not been in the OR for twenty hours, in a hospital that’s not dependent on the size of the fuel supply for the generators.”

All right, those were legitimate considerations. Even if Tony hated the idea of Martin having to stay in a hospital for one minute longer than absolutely necessary. 

Martin was tugging at the restraints on his wrist, which reminded Tony of another reason why he didn’t want to wait. “Does he have to stay tied up like that?”

“Not if he stops trying to pull out the IV,” Robinson conceded, and untied the restraint on his side of the bed while Tony freed the wrist on his side.

Martin promptly reached up to displace the mask they’d just got on him. “Tony,” he rasped, reaching to grab Tony’s hand. “Tony, how many people are missing?”

“I don’t know,” Tony admitted. “I only got to England about twenty minutes ago.”

“What about Caroline? And Douglas? And...”

“Arthur’s here, somewhere, but his phone’s shut off. Caroline and Douglas are at the other hospital. She’s okay, he’s not badly hurt.” Tony had told him that once already, but he figured it hadn’t sunk in the first time.

“What about Carl?”

“Carl?” 

“The ATC. And Phil, and Terry, and Mike...” Martin started coughing again, forced himself to stop, and gasped out. “Ground crew.”

They’d all be people Martin knew, Tony realized. Fitton just wasn’t that big a place, and a disaster like this one was like dropping a bomb on a village. (Not one of his, though, not anymore.) And at least one of them was dead. “I don’t know,” Tony said again, because he didn’t want to talk about that, not yet. “If they’re still pulling people out, we might not be able to find out for a while.”

“Didn’t you find them all?”

“Martin,” Tony said, tucking himself as close as he could get with the rail in the way. “I came here, to you. I haven’t been to Fitton yet.” He could hug Martin if he was careful, so he did, and Martin’s hands came up around him as far as the damn tubes would allow. 

“I don’t want you to go.” Martin was getting Tony’s shoulder damp. “But you have to, you have to. If they haven’t found everyone...” He drew a deep, shaky breath. “Tony, you have to go.”


	40. Chapter 40

“I don’t want to leave you alone.” But Martin could hear the acquiescence in Tony’s voice. “Sweet fuck, Martin! You’re hurt! What kind of boyfriend do you think I am?”

And now Martin could hear the self-doubt and feel the tension that was practically making Tony vibrate with indecision. He made himself sit back so he could look into Tony’s eyes, let Tony look into his and see his determination. “You’re my _hero,_ ” he said, reaching for a note of command, trying to make the words come out right. “And I’m hurt but I’m safe. I can wait. Please. _Go!_ ”


	41. Chapter 41

Jenny missed most of the conversation Tony Stark was having with her patient between taking notes from Dr. Robinson and wondering where Kiran, the tech from Pulmonary, had got to. But she approved of Stark’s insistence that if he had to leave, Crieff had to promise to be good for the nurses. Useful that, if she needed leverage later. 

She was mentally reviewing the message to send up to Pulmonary when she noticed the photographer drifting inconspicuously in the corner and damned Tony Stark for destroying her nascent respect. Did the man’s ego need to have an entourage for everything?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so short, but the characters are fighting over point of view...


	42. Chapter 42

By the time Tony persuaded Martin to calm down again - or at least to keep the breathing mask in place and close his eyes and pretend to relax - the doctor and the nurse had finished tossing medical arcana at each other and wandered off, he to the next patient over and she stomping off back to the desk where Tony had first found her. Which was okay, really, except that Tony had been listening with half an ear and while some of it he could figure out some of it didn’t. (“Expiratory and inspiratory wheezing”, sure, but “decreased at the bases” what the fuck?) And he wanted to find out what they meant by “an unproductive wet cough” because the back of his head was trying to tell him that the whole point of a “wet” cough was that it was “productive” which would mean it was getting the crap out of Martin’s lungs, except it sounded like it wasn’t, even with the doctor telling Martin that coughing was good for him right now. Which sucked, because Martin was having enough fun just trying to let himself cough in the first place. (“I don’t want to be a nuisance”) _God help us if he thinks he's doing it wrong!_

So Tony wanted to ask, and that meant asking the nurse because he didn’t want Martin listening in, and while he could probably just harass Bruce about it later, asking now would give him an excuse to stay within eyeball distance of Martin a few seconds longer. Except that the nurse had picked up the landline, and was paging somebody called “Kiran Mittal” which was giving Tony an even better excuse to hang around, even if he couldn’t exactly interrupt her until his throat had unclenched from saying good-bye to Martin.


	43. Chapter 43

Tom looked up from his viewfinder, realizing that something had gone askew by the way that Stark had gone from polite inquiry to acrylic charm in his dealings with the nurse, who was definitely giving him the cold shoulder. He took the shot, quickly, and then tucked the camera to one side as he approached the desk. A hissed, “...publicity stunt...” told him he’d guessed right about what the problem was, but he barely managed to get there in time to keep Stark from putting his stockinged foot in his mouth.

“Look...” Stark began. 

Tom interposed himself, quickly. “Tom Young, Cambridge News.” He dropped one of his cards on the desk. “And I promise that I shan’t be publishing any photographs I might take without the direct permission of everyone who appears in them. But it helps to have a sequence. It’s a kind of visual note-taking. Because there will be a story. Given Mr. Stark’s presence, that’s unavoidable.” He tapped the card, “but you can chase off any of my colleagues by referring them to me and telling them I’ve got an exclusive.”

Stark shook his head. “I’ve got to thank your friend Barrow too,” he objected. “He’ll want an interview, and I owe him that much at the very least.”

Tom grinned. “Exclusive for print?” he said. “It’ll make my boss furious. She thinks celebrities are a nuisance too.” _But it will sell a lot of papers, and we’ll definitely make the quarterly budget._

The nurse was scowling. “I don’t understand.”

Stark startled Tom by giving him a one-armed hug, as if they were best buddies facing off the nurse together. “If it weren’t for this guy and his connections I’d still be looking for Martin,” he said. “And Martin might still be stuck in the mud in Fitton. Which is where I’ve got to go, in case anyone _else_ is stuck in the mud, so if you could just help me find Arthur Shappey, everyone gets happy. Martin has someone to sit by his bed, and I can get out of here with a clear conscience.”

“Arthur Shappey is one of Captain Crieff’s crew,” Tom added. “He was in the ambulance that brought him here, but he wasn’t in the computer at admissions, so he’s probably in one of the waiting areas.”

“But you can page him.” Stark was definitely pouring on the charm now. “C’mon, please?”


	44. Chapter 44

“Arthur Shappey, please call extension 1441, Mr. Arthur Shappey, please call extension 1441.”

Tony looked to see if Martin had noticed the page, but Martin’s eyes were closed and he’d slumped back against the pillows like an exhausted balloon. He might even have gone back to sleep, which would be good if he got some rest and bad if he got nightmares, but hey, that was the whole point of trying to find Arthur wasn’t it? Because Arthur might be a menace to coffee makers everywhere, but if there was a bright side to anything he’d find it, and Martin could definitely use some bright sides to this whole mess.

Tony sighed and bit his lip, counting off seconds until he thought it might be reasonable to ask the nurse to try again. He was just taking in a breath to say something when the phone rang and not one, but two of the line lights began to blink. The nurse picked up on the top one first, and it wasn’t Arthur, it was the guy she’d paged first, who she wanted to come down and evaluate Martin’s cough and do a nebulizer treatment and that was okay, but it took her a while to say it and Tony found himself crossing his fingers and watching the other line light blink hoping it wouldn’t go out entirely before she got done.

At last she finished the first call and switched over. Two seconds in she nodded and handed the phone over to Tony.

“Arthur? It’s Tony.”

“Tony? Are you here already? Brilliant!” Arthur was a little hoarse, but that was no surprise given how much talking he’d done while Martin was trapped. 

“Yeah. Listen, where are you? I thought you’d be with Martin.” 

“I was too muddy. One of the nurses took me off to get cleaned up.”

“Okay, so where are you? Ask the nurse.”

“I can’t, she’s not here.” Arthur sighed, his enthusiasm a little dented. “And the doctor hasn’t come yet. I’ve been waiting and waiting, and I peeked outside, but there’s nobody there, either.” 

This was getting screwy. If Arthur had been admitted, he’d be in the hospital’s computer, and JARVIS would have let Tony know. And every corridor Tony’d been in so far had been full of people. Tony told Arthur to hang on and tucked the phone back against his shoulder. “Can you tell where he is by the extension?” he asked the nurse.

She leaned over to look at the display on the phone and frowned. “That’s... what’s he doing in the OB-Gyn clinic? They should be closed now.”

 _OB-Gyn?_ Maybe she was wrong. “Arthur, are there any signs on the walls?” Tony dodged hospitals whenever possible, but he had to admit they were usually pretty well labelled.

“There are some posters about good nutrition and ...er... ladies’ bits.” Arthur whispered the last part. “The nurse said everywhere else was taken.”

Definitely screwy. “Just come back down to Emergency,” Tony said.

“I can’t.”


	45. Chapter 45

Arthur would have been happy to explain everything, if Tony hadn’t growled, “Look, just stay there and I’ll come up,” in the kind of growly voice that generally meant it was time for Arthur to stay very quiet and let Mum come sort out the passenger before they got all shouty. And then he hung up, which was a bit rude, because he hadn’t said goodbye. Only, he was going to come up and say hello, so maybe he meant to say goodbye in person. 

Yes, that was probably right. It did mean that Arthur should probably try to do something about the not-having-any-clothes problem, though. Because even if it was all boys together in the all-together Arthur was fairly certain that it would be more polite for him to be wearing something, even if all he’d found in the drawers was a paper robe that didn’t go down very far.

There was a sort of sheet-thing which he’d used for sleeping, but it wasn’t as big as a bedsheet, and could only cover you if you scrunched up. Arthur had already tried making it into a toga and it kept falling off. (Maybe the Romans had been less slippery.) And he was too old to make it into a diaper, even if he could find big safety pins. He was looking in the drawers for scissors, thinking he could make it into a ghost-sheet when he heard voices outside the door.

He went to see and saw Tony coming along the darkened corridor, talking over his shoulder to another man. Arthur looked him up and down and realized something was missing.

“Tony?” he cried, letting the door fall open wider. “Where are your shoes?”

Tony turned to look at Arthur and blinked. “Dude!” he said. “Where are your clothes?”


	46. Chapter 46

Tony promised himself not to ask Arthur to explain anything again. Ever. Unless it was to have him explain something to Cap and see how long it took for Steve Rogers’ legendary patience to wear thin. He got the gist of it, though. Someone had brought Arthur upstairs, offered to wash his clothes, and then robbed him blind. Not that Arthur had figured that part out yet. He still figured that the nice lady would come back, once she wasn’t so busy, and Tony wasn’t going to waste time trying to change his mind. _I bet he puts out cookies for Santa Claus every year._

“Here,” he said, pulling off the plaid shirt he’d got in Maine. The thermal underwear underneath would be enough, now that he wasn’t flying so high, and the armor was a sweatbox anyway. “This will take care of your top half, anyway, until somebody can chase out some scrubs for you to wear.”

“Thank you!” Arthur was just as pleased as if the shirt weren’t sweaty and too small. “Now what can we do about the bottom half?”

Tony picked up the sheet. It wasn’t enough fabric for a dhoti, but he could rig something basic. “Hold still,” he told Arthur.

Tom Young showed back up while Tony was still trying to get Arthur to stop giggling every time he went to fold the edge of the sarong down to hold it in place. “No scrubs that I can find,” the reporter reported, and then flipped up his camera to get another shot just at the point where Tony gone around behind and was reaching between Arthur’s legs to grab the front edge of the sarong and bring it back to be secured at the waist. 

“Don’t show Martin that one,” Tony told him. “At least not until I’ve seen it first.”

“It’s mostly Arthur,” Tom said.

“Ooh, can I see?” Arthur said. When Tom obliged, he peered at the tiny image and clapped his hands. “Gosh, I look like I’m a lumberjack from Hawaii! Brilliant!”

Tony’s laughter _hurt_ as it broke through the tension that had frozen his face muscles into place ever since he’d heard Martin’s frantic call for help. Arthur’s enthusiasm and relentless optimism were the best kind of infectious, and just what Martin needed during the long hours till Tony could get back to him. _And kinda what I needed too._


	47. Chapter 47

The trouble with Tony Stark, Tom decided, as he watched the billionaire carefully rephrase himself until young Shappey stopped chasing wild hares, was that the man was a giant vortex of obnoxious charm. What he couldn’t get with money, he could wheedle out of you by sheer persistence. Not that it didn’t take persistence to deal with Arthur, who understandably wanted to go hunting out his trousers _before_ going down to A &E to sit with Martin. In fact, it was a little like watching a Monty Python routine, with Arthur inserting, “find my trousers” into the things he was meant to do no matter how many times Stark asked him to recite back the list.

But Stark was patient. Really patient, not just putting on a mask or being patronizing, which Tom suspected that Arthur would detect, even if the younger man really and truly believed that the person who had taken his clothes was a proper nurse. And Tony Stark being patient was not something Tom had expected. Gentle persuasion with the man he loved, yes, that made sense; Tom had seen how well Tony and Martin fitted together at Duxford. But this was different.

“A proper nurse would have taken the time to put antiseptic on your scrapes,” Stark said, “and made you wash the mud out of your hair with something better than a sink and a couple of squirts of hand soap.” Stark was dealing with the scrapes on Arthur’s knees and hands, having raided the cupboards for supplies and made Arthur sit down on the exam table. Tom took the shot with only a quarter of his brain wondering if it was being staged for his benefit. But the two of them had forgotten his existence, and the soft click of the shutter didn’t waylay the conversation.

“She said it was because they were so busy,” Arthur explained.

“If she was a proper nurse,” Stark went on. “She would have given you your phone and wallet out of your pocket, so they didn’t get lost in the wash.”

“Oh.” Arthur was crestfallen. “But she seemed so nice. And she understood about not-scared crying.”

“Not-scared crying?”

“Yes, you know. When it’s safe to cry because the scary part is over?” Which explained a lot about why Arthur had been willing to follow a stranger to a darkened and remote corner of the hospital.

Stark stilled, except for the way his hands curled back into themselves. “It’s not over for Martin,” he said gruffly, and it wasn’t Tom’s imagination: that was a tear, sliding down his cheek.

Tom had dozens of shots of Tony Stark now, but he what he needed was a shot of the billionaire in the Iron Man armor. He’d could tweet it out as “Iron Man Flies to England to Assist Thor in Fitton Rescue,” which would be a nice big scoop and sell lots of papers.

And that would have to be enough, wouldn’t it? Drew could have the damn exclusive.


	48. Chapter 48

Arthur knew he’d explained things wrong somehow, but he was used to that. And while he was pretty sure you weren’t meant to pat superheroes on the head, Tony really needed a hug and with Arthur sitting on the table and Tony sitting on a chair Tony’s head was down by his knees, so that was all he could reach. “Oh, this isn’t the scary part,” he explained. “This is the hurty sad part. It was much scarier when things were blowing up at us.” And when people were dying in front of them, only Arthur wasn’t ready to talk about that bit yet.

Tony bit his lip and turned his head away from Arthur’s hand, but it was only to rub his face against his shoulder, so Arthur didn’t think he minded having been petted. (And oh, Arthur wanted to go home and pet Snoopadoop now, he really did. And he wanted his trousers, because it was bad enough being in the way without being in the way and having people laugh at you for not having your trousers on. But he hadn’t made Tony feel better yet, and that was more important than trousers or Snoopadoop, who was perfectly safe and happy waiting for him and mum to get home.) 

“He told me to go away,” Tony said in a low voice. “So he needs you to be there for him, okay, Arthur? He’s scared for all the people at Fitton and he wants me to rescue them. To make sure they’re okay.”

“That’s not the same thing as wanting you to go away,” Arthur said, although he knew it felt like it was. “And Skipper’s too smart to think you can make sure _everyone’s_ okay. Not even Douglas can do that. He just wants you to do the parts he can’t do because he’s hurt. To make it as better as you can, because nobody gets it perfect just as better as they can.” And Tony was brilliant, so his better was going to be pretty good. And besides, Thor was at Fitton, and he’d rescued Martin already and was probably rescuing more people even as they spoke. 

And then Arthur thought of something which made him feel better. “Oh, and Tony, if you go to Fitton, you can look in GERTI for my suitcase and spare trousers.”

Tony looked up at him. “GERTI’s all right? She didn’t get damaged?”

“She was the last time I saw. And Skip had us make sure all the tie-downs were extra secure while we were mooring her. We’d just finished doing that, so we didn’t have time to get our things before everything went wrong. Didn’t Skip tell you that?”

“He doesn’t remember what happened.”

“Oh.” Well that was definitely more important than trousers, and only Arthur could fix it. He hopped down from the exam table and clutched the sheet sarong, which felt like it might want to slip, even if it hadn’t. “I’d best go tell him then.”


	49. Chapter 49

With Arthur finally dispatched back down to sit by Martin in the emergency room, Tony knew he’d run out of excuses to linger. He headed for the stairs. He was aware that Tom Young was panting along in his wake, but it wasn’t until they got back up to where the suit was standing that the reporter said anything.

“Wait up a moment.” Young clearly didn’t have to try to keep up with a tower full of gym bunnies. “I need... a couple of... “ He waved his camera in explanation.

“Hero shots?” Tony said sourly. He tapped the armor on the chest. “JARVIS, open up.”

“Yeah.” Young propped himself against a wall and raised the camera, sending the shutter into a frenzy of clicks as Tony suited up. “Something to send my editor so she forgives me for being so far off my patch.”

“Haven’t you been sending her pictures already?” Tony asked, as he settled his hands more comfortably into the gauntlets.

Young shook his head. “I told you I’d let you see them first. And besides,” he frowned. “I’m not sure whether or not I should.”

Tony shifted position, letting JARVIS know not to seal the helmet yet. “What do you mean?” he asked. Young shuffled his feet and hunched his shoulders as he lowered his camera, which was completely wrong for a paparazzi guy.

“It just seems... voyeuristic.” Young didn’t notice Tony’s eyebrows trying to crawl into his hairline. “The ‘hero comes to the rescue’ storyline should be plenty.”

“No, no, no, no,” Tony stomped over to get a hold of Young’s shoulders, grateful for the extra inches he got in the suit, because he needed to be impressive for this. “I gave you an exclusive for a reason.”

“But it shouldn’t be news!” Young protested. “It shouldn’t be news that you’re worried about your lover when there are so many other people here in the same position.”

“No, it shouldn’t,” Tony had to concede that point. But he laid on the intensity he usually only used on Pepper when he really needed things to go his way, because no way was he going to call for a big press conference and shit about his new boyfriend in the middle of a fucking disaster. “And if I had my way, it wouldn’t be. Martin doesn’t need the grief. But I can’t hide how I feel about him, so it’s going to be news. I don’t get a choice about that. I just get lucky enough to have the choice to pick somebody to tell the story who thinks those other people should have their stories be just as important as mine.”

Young made a noise of pure frustration, but his shoulders eased up even as he swore and closed his eyes, so Tony knew he’d won. “Fuck!”

“Sorry, that position’s taken,” Tony quipped, stepping back now and striking a pose. “Come on now: hero shot. The sooner I get outta here, the sooner I can get back.”


	50. Chapter 50

Pepper gave a sigh of relief when she saw Tony’s heartbeat begin to register in of one of the displays JARVIS was projecting throughout the room. The earbug communicator was strictly audio, and limited by proximity to the suit or a WIFI net, and when Tony was off on his own like this Pepper preferred to know that he had all of the secure communications and sensors which came along with being a genius wrapped in a fancy alloy shell full of gadgets.

She activated her end of the link, which let her see the grim expression on his face as he responded. “Hey, Pepper. Any updates on the weather?”

“‘The ridge of high pressure in the North Sea is collapsing, which should allow the storm to move continue on a northeast track within the next hour. England will see another eight to ten hours in the rain bands, but the winds should be diminishing slowly over the next three to four hours’.” Pepper read off the most recent prediction. “Not that this storm has ever bothered to read the weather reports. Are you on your way to Fitton?”

“Yeah. Martin’s worried about the people there.”

Pepper wasn’t surprised. She’d be frantic if a plane landed on top of her friends too. “Is he badly hurt?”

“Bad enough,” Tony sighed. “But he’ll live.”

“It’s a good hospital,” Pepper offered. “They’ve got a top-notch reputation.”

“Yeah, just too much work to do.” Tony pulled a face. “Pep, what do you do when I get hurt? Get drunk? Hit things? What makes it better?”

“Doing what I can,” Pepper said, although she’d tried both the other options in the past. “But it’s mostly waiting, Tony.”

“I’m bad at waiting, Pepper, you know I am.”

“You’re a genius, Tony. You’ll figure it out.”


	51. Chapter 51

George Warden, Chief Engineer of the Fitton airfield, was chasing after a meter-high reel of cable that had blown loose when Iron Man dropped out of the sky and stopped it. George puffed the last few yards to the reel and caught a flange so it couldn’t escape again before gasping “Thanks,” and putting his oher hand on his knee and his head down so he could catch his breath. He was getting too old for this.

“No problem.” The electronically advanced voice ignored the rain-filled wind. “Where do you need it?”

“Back by the truck,” George waved in the right direction, and Iron Man began to roll the reel that way. George followed along. “You’re good at electrics, aren’t you?” he asked, and then blushed, despite how tired he was. Tony Stark was an engineering god, for Christ’s sake, and all George was thinking was that here was someone strong enough to fight the damn wind.

“I get by.” The metal face couldn’t look amused, but somehow the body language did. 

“We need to keep the lights on,” George said. “So they can see.” The rescuers had headlamps and their own light rigs, but they didn’t go very far through the murk. And George didn’t trust his own damaged systems not to start another fire if he just connected back to the mains, which meant rigging the big lights to generator trucks, individually, and he was just one man, and it was taking too damn long. “Can you help me?”

“Yeah, I can. But I promised Martin I’d make sure everyone was found and safe first. Is there someone in charge I can ask about that?”

“Martin? _Our_ Martin? Captain Crieff?” George asked, startled. “So that’s where he ran off to.”

“Kinda hard to run with a broken leg.”


	52. Chapter 52

_Goddamnittalltohell._ Tony wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to make the local yokel flinch, but for a moment he felt like he was in a cartoon, with Bruce doing yoga on one shoulder and Big Green hulking on the other, offering conflicting advice about what to do about the rumor that was apparently shredding Martin’s reputation with everyone he knew. 

“You don’t know what happened,” Shoulder-Bruce pointed out. “They were here, you weren’t.”

Shoulder-Hulk just growled. It sounded like good advice, too, but Shoulder-Pepper showed up in time to remind Tony that smashing all the evidence and witnesses would leave the rumor intact to go farther. And the guy Tony wanted to smash was asking about Martin’s broken leg like he didn’t know about it, so here was a chance to get some facts into the mix in both directions.

“I just left the hospital in Coventry,” Tony managed to say it without biting off each word. “He’s got a broken femur and crap in his lungs because it took nearly an hour to find him and then over an hour to get him dug out of where he was pinned down in the mud by debris. _How the **fuck** did you not know he was hurt?_ ”

The guy flinched again and started watching his shoes, so Tony hadn’t done the most tactful job in the world, but he wasn’t running away, and he answered, _so good enough, shut up, Pepper, I’ve got this._ “He wasn’t with Douglas and Carolyn. And I had to stop looking at what they were carrying out in the ambulances and try to fix things because nobody else was doing it.” His voice cracked on the last five words.

 _Oh._ Okay. Fixing things. Tony could get behind that. He flipped up the visor to signal that he thought the guy might possibly not be a total jerk. “What’s your name?”

“Warden. George Warden. I’m the head of the Engineering crew.”

Tony caught himself before he could ask where the rest of the crew was, since chances were good most of them were in the same hospitals as the MJN crew. “Tony Stark,” he said, and offered a gauntlet. “Let me check in with the rescue types and if they can spare me I’ll try to get back to help string lights.”

Warden looked up, and took the proffered hand. “That would good,” he said. “Thanks.”


	53. Chapter 53

“Active scan, JARVIS,” Master Stark said as he launched again. “The more data we get the better chance we have to figure out what actually happened.”

“Of course, Sir.” JARVIS had been doing the normal scans plus infrared in any case, knowing that their ostensible reason for being at Fitton was a search for survivors, but now he activated the full range of sensors, letting the raw data flow back through the links to his server. There would be time to compensate for the distortions caused by the rain later. “Shall I prioritize accuracy or speed?”

“Split it 70/30 towards accuracy, J. But any heat signatures that might be people needing rescue go to the top of the line, whatever else you see.”

“Yes, sir. I have located Lord Thor.” JARVIS put the location up on the HUD. The Asgardian was hidden from ordinary view by the tangled fuselages of three aircraft, but JARVIS could identify those peculiar emissions through more obstructions than a few layers of aluminium. “Will you be joining him?”

Master Stark shook his head inside the helmet as if Jarvis could see. “Not unless he needs me. But make sure he knows that I’ve arrived.”


	54. Chapter 54

“Food’s here. Cough up, everyone.” Clint Barton snagged the bills the remaining Avengers and Pepper held up and went to meet the elevator. It dinged and disgorged a stack of pizza boxes propelled by a pair of skinny legs. “Over here,” Clint steered the kid to the bar and relieved him of his burden before stuffing the notes into his hand. “That cover it?”

The pizza delivery guy was new, a college-age kid without the curly hair and beak-nose that would mark him as one of Giorgio’s numerous nephews. He hadn’t even looked at the money, because he was craning his neck to try to see everything he could. “Sure,” he squeaked, “thanks,” and let himself be aimed back at the elevator before suddenly digging his heels in and tugging out a slender notebook and a pen. “Er, could I, uhm, get your...”

Clint obliged, scribbling the hawk-shape that was nothing like his legal signature onto one of the grubby pages. It gave him a chance to find out the kid’s name, which would, in turn give him a chance to figure out who the kid was and why he spent more of his chance to ogle staring at Bruce than at Pepper or Natasha. It wasn’t because he hadn’t noticed the ladies! 

Not that there wasn’t a reason to stare at Bruce. Tony had found the airfield manager at Fitton and the cop in charge before starting to run a search pattern, but now details were filling in steadily in the big wireframe holo that took up half the living room space. Without JARVIS and the satellite links it would have been impossible to do it right; the wind was changing direction and the rain was still coming down in erratic bursts. But with that technical assistance, Tony was able to cover the ground without leaving gaps. And with JARVIS concentrating on collecting the data, Bruce was standing in the middle of the “airport” and looking for anomalies. JARVIS had rot-13’d all the text, but you didn’t need text to understand that you were seeing the ghost of a disaster. And Clint had a funny feeling that rot-13 wasn’t going to be enough to keep the kid from reading for very long.

“Okay, there you go, Mr. Parker,” Clint pushed the kid and his notebook into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor. “Good night!”

“Goodnight,” came the echo, but the doors had closed and the elevator was making going-down noises. Good. Clint could deal with him later.

JARVIS unscrambled the hologram texts, not that anyone noticed in the rush for pizza. It had been a long time since lunch, and no one was planning to get to sleep soon. Not with Tony and Thor (and Martin and the others) still out of reach. 

The elevator dinged again and opened on the kid, who stepped out and pointed to the hologram. “That doesn’t make sense,” he announced, all shyness gone. “The drag lines are all wrong.”


	55. Chapter 55

“Drag lines?” Tony asked, as he shifted a piece of airplane that had gotten wedged over one of the air raid bunkers which dated back to Steve’s War, when Fitton had been a base for bomber crews. They were the kind of place the local ground crew would think of when things were exploding, and impervious to a remote scan, which meant getting up close and personal. 

“The kid says that if you look at the mooring points and planes you can see how they turned in the wind as the wind changed,” Clint reported. “But what he and Bruce are having palpitations over is the gap between the planes that blew up and the ones that didn’t. It looks like at least one plane travelled _into_ the wind after it caught fire.”

“How?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know,” Clint said. “JARV, can you show him on the heads-up?”

“This is the area, sir,” JARVIS said, obligingly lighting up the map inside the helmet. “Here is the area where the other MJN crew were active, and here,” JARVIS lit a third point, much closer to the planes than the fallen fire engine, “is the position where Captain Crieff was found.”


	56. Chapter 56

Carolyn was contemplating the possibility of obtaining more coffee (even if the murky liquid out of the hospital vending machines was scarcely worthy of the epithet) when her pocket began to rattle. She checked. Another text from Ms Potts, assuring her that there was no further news, good or bad, but asking her to call, had she the battery life left to do so.

She didn’t, but Douglas’s mobile was in the bag of his possessions, tucked into the nightstand beside his bed, and he’d been too woozy to use it once he’d called his daughter to assure her that he was all right. Carolyn retrieved it and tapped her dozing first officer on the shoulder. “May I use this, Douglas?” she asked, when he cracked an eyelid.

“Will it require me to pretend consciousness? No. Therefore, you may consider permission granted.” He waved a hand vaguely and closed his eyes again, but Carolyn was reassured by the return of Richardsonian levels of snark. His headache must be ebbing. 

“Thank you.” The hospital discouraged the use of mobiles in the wards, so Carolyn went down to the cafeteria, where she could get coffee from an overworked urn and a slightly squashed bun before commanding a chair at a table otherwise occupied by storm-stranded tourists in varying states of shock and exhaustion.

If she were to be honest with herself (which she had no intention of doing just yet) her own condition left much to be desired. After a long flight with nothing but Arthur and that ridiculous coffee machine to distract her from the realization that she had put herself into the invidious position of playing cupid to the love life of two men, one of whom had never been gifted with a scrap of luck and the other of whom had never been gifted with an attention span. It was a recipe for disaster. 

And it had not taken long to have a disaster, even if it wasn’t the kind of disaster she’d been envisioning.

Enough. At last check, she still had an aeroplane, and she still had a crew, however battered. She still had a company, and by the grace of God she had coffee and a slightly squashed bun, and _she could **do** this._

She unlocked Douglas’s phone and dialed, waiting for the click of connection. “Hello, Ms. Potts? Mrs Knapp-Shappey here, how can I help you?”


	57. Chapter 57

The data was incomplete. 

That’s what Bruce had to keep reminding himself. The data was incomplete. Corrupted, too, by the action of heavy rain and high winds on the physical side, and by the inevitable skewing by self-centeredness and shock when it came to the testimony of witnesses. (And in that area he could only be grateful that Tony had somehow managed to gain access to the raw feeds from the local news station and not just the edited down bites fed to the general public.) 

The data was incomplete and corrupt and full of possible contradictions.

And yet, somehow, between himself and Clint and Natasha and Steve and Pepper and the brief but enlightening comments of the pizza guy (who’d promised to come back tomorrow and talk to Pepper about the possibilities of employment) a narrative was emerging.

Bruce went over to the bar and made himself a Shirley Temple (one of the perquisites of living with Tony Stark was a steady supply of grenadine and maraschino cherries). Clint and Natasha were distributing little holographic people onto the mock-up based on interviews. Steve was on the phone with someone from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch of the British Department for Transport. Pepper was on the line with Tony, explaining who he needed to find to sign the forms that would let him stay in England without being harassed until she got his passport over there. And underneath everything was the murmur of voices, conversations JARVIS was monitoring from the emergency services, broadcasts playing on the tv in half a dozen languages splitscreened again and again in case somewhere a journalist tapped into a source they hadn’t found yet.

So much data, and still incomplete. But it would have to do.

Bruce put down his glass. “JARVIS? Let it run.”


	58. Chapter 58

_The simulation is a tale told in light, a story set against a background of laserbeams and acted by illusions. Only the script is uncertain._

_The palest holograms are no more than likelihoods, assumptions made about who must be where and when activity must have happened to create responses that are better documented. Even the better sourced holograms are not much more than gossamer light, set to flicker in and out of existence, dependent on the scraps of data that place them in time. Less than a handful seem solidly white: the ATC in his tower, the lady who is in charge of customs, the teenager who has stepped into his absent father’s shoes, pouring tea and offering sandwiches from the tiny terminal canteen to the people stranded far from their hoped-for destinations. Trapped by their duties, they seem almost solid, poltergeists holding still in a sea of ghosts. White will do for the bit players. For this first attempt, JARVIS has other fish to fry. The AI has given green to Arthur and yellow to Douglas, blue to Carolyn and red to Martin. GERTI is blue as well, but where Carolyn’s mannikin is the color of a crayon from a box of eight, GERTI is outlined in the blue of steel. These five holograms will persist, moving smoothly when JARVIS has adequate data, leaping suddenly where there are gaps, leaving trails of color behind._

_The homunculi are cupped within GERTI’s framework as the simulation begins to run. Douglas and Martin in the cockpit, Carolyn and Arthur seated in the first row of the cabin. For the moment, the holographic airfield shrinks down, the scale adjusting long enough to establish the holding pattern that is being steadily emptied of flights as the simulation clock spins ten times faster than the reality. (JARVIS can place great confidence in this part of the data, as it is scraped from the material he recorded automatically as he monitored the MJN flight. There was no priority then on the radio chatter from the tower, or the other planes circling over Fitton, but the information has not been written over (nor will it be, now) and it is detailed enough that JARVIS could make the calculations from it while rebooting.) The simulation shows each plane as it lands and trundles from the main runway over to the usually unused strip of tarmac that runs parallel. Sixty years ago it was home to B-52s and Avro Lancasters and Lincolns, and the berths are still there, groundbolts ready to receive the mooring lines of private planes, company jets, and charters, along with a few mid-sized jets which normally make the small hops from airline hubs to more remote locations. Ground crew and ground crew vehicles flicker from berth to berth, their positions mostly assumed, not proven; and the question-marks of passengers are hustled toward the terminal as the flight crews stay behind to solve the problems of mooring and luggage._

_Twelve planes are left in the air when GERTI begins to wallow her way down. The wind has been picking up, changing direction, and it is six of one, half a dozen of the other if she should use the main runway or the shorter secondary that runs off it at a forty degree angle. A crosswind either way, but the secondary will put them closer to their usual berth and the ATC must be feeling merciful. Or worried. At ten times speed it is painfully obvious that he has chosen to leave less time between landings. For a moment it seems as if he has pushed too far, that the next plane to land will clip GERTI before she crosses the intersection of the two runways, but that disaster, at least, is avoided. GERTI pulls into place and her crew disembark, scrambling for chocks and mooring lines. Martin’s icon gains an addition before his foot touches ground, a small bright star of gold indicating that he has activated the Starkphone in his pocket. His homunculus brightens with certainty, although the other crew blur as their data wobbles._

_Less than a minute later in the simulation, less than ten minutes in the world that was, two more planes are on the ground and the MJN crew are walking towards the terminal._

_That’s when the lightning strikes._

_The first bolt doesn’t hit the airfield. It’s nearly a mile away. But it is so close to the aeroplane that’s currently coming in to land that it is impossible to tell from the simulation if it does the damage directly upon the body of the plane or merely makes the pilot flinch. It will take more physical evidence to be sure, and the holograph flickers to show that JARVIS is guessing, projecting the sudden sideways flip of a craft far too large and clumsy to recover. Momentum carries it forward, low and slow and not quite on target, and it might be debris or the low side wing that shears through the powerlines and it might not, but the jet keeps turning as it falls, and by the time it has bounced and skipped and slid into the end of the long row of planes trapped on the ground, the fuselage is upside down, the wings have broken free, and debris is everywhere._

_In the air, the next plane is coming. It swoops down over the airfield, close enough to part a tall man’s hair, only succeeding in pulling up as the first explosion blooms._

_On the ground, the holograph of the airport fire engine has gone solid, tipped on one side, its crew caught inside and below. Douglas and Arthur and Martin are running towards it. Carolyn has turned to chase a clutter of civilians toward the terminal. Martin’s phone has fallen to the ground, and gleams, forgotten, as the flicker grows worse. This is where the uncertainty lies. But it is clear from what Arthur told Carolyn that he and Douglas and Martin were trying to help the fire crew until sometime after the second explosion, but before the third, Martin said he’d be right back and ran off toward the maintenance building. His red line goes off that way, but circles back after the third explosion, ending in the drainage ditch between the old and modern runways, while Douglas and Arthur are pulled in to helping what’s left of the fire crew try to get hoses out, to battle the growing flames, until Douglas is felled by a firehose out of control and the rain begins to fall too hard for the fires to sustain themselves._

_JARVIS stops the simulation and runs it back, highlighting the planes which were caught by the crash, the ones which exploded in their berths. Two of them shift position with the wind, moving toward the rest of the parked aircraft. But the third doesn’t. It begins to, it seems, from the trail of melted rubber across the tarmac, but then it turns, pushed back into the wreckage, before it can set alight the next plane down the line._

_And the only known entity, the only person JARVIS is certain of, who might have been close enough to affect its path?_

_**Martin.**   
_


	59. Chapter 59

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've been quiet. Life, the Universe, and This Chapter were not cooperating.

Tony hung in the air, letting the lines of the simulation in the heads-up display match up to the real airfield below his feet. Not that he could see the real airfield, except in the places where Warden had rigged generators to the lights. The sun had set long ago, and even the twilight had been fading to instrument detection levels by the time Tony had reached England. There was a waxing moon up there, sliding into the west, but the clouds were too thick to let it illuminate the scene below. Technically, Tony could have watched the sim from anywhere. But he wanted to be here, able to pretend, if only inside his own head, that he was in the right place at the right time, and not sleeping an ocean away while Martin’s world was torn apart.

“Run it again, JARVIS,” he said, “And light up any info you’ve got on David Lester.” The junior engineer was the only airfield crew member still unaccounted for. Technically, Tony was looking for him, not that there was much left of the airfield he hadn’t gone over. And the only living things his scans had found so far were either trapped passengers surrounded by rescuers or animals hunched in whatever shelter they could find to wait out the storm. According to Warden, Lester had been driving a luggage cart to the terminal, half the field away from the crash, but there was no sign of him now. 

And the puzzle of what Martin might have done was fizzing in the back of Tony’s brain like a jolt of caffeine. 

He tried dropping down, but the HUD couldn’t handle the change of position, and he had to jockey back into the right spot, leaning against the wind. His fingers itched with wanting to play with the display code. At home he’d be able to walk right down into the hologram, check things out up close. 

The red line of Martin’s movements was distracting.

“How certain of the timing are we on this, JARVIS?” he asked. It was so tempting to believe that Martin had run out and turned a burning jet around with bare hands (and Tony couldn’t discount it entirely; he’d seen people do some really unlikely things under the influence of adrenalin) but if it had happened, it had happened without any witnesses, and there was too large a margin of error to go grabbing for an implausible solution out of preliminary data. Not to mention that they still didn’t have confirmed positions for several of the Fitton ground crew personnel at the time of the crash, and that didn’t even take Lester into account.

“The explosions were audible over the phone connection,” JARVIS reminded Tony. “Not including the initial crash, which must have occurred at the point when I lost contact with the airfield. Given the pattern of debris, and the burns in the tarmac, the last airplane must have exploded within fifteen minutes of the moment when Captain Crieff dropped his phone.”

That didn’t leave much time for someone else to have come swooping in to the rescue, Tony admitted. But he had to be sure of his ground. It wasn’t just a matter of convincing the world that Martin might have done something heroic, it was a matter of convincing Martin, and Tony was pretty sure that would be the sticking point. “Could the plane have caught on something? A mooring line perhaps, that kept it from going too far and then it started swinging to one side?”

“There is no such mooring line in your scans, sir,”

“It could have blown loose. See if you can find a point of rotation, or a point which could be a line reeling out during the turn. I’ll see if there’s a mooring hook there.”

JARVIS obligingly began the calculations, making the theoretical lines visible as a courtesy to observers with less processing power or less time for math. Tony left him to it, concentrating on the rest of the layout, hoping to think of somewhere Lester might have gotten to that would be impervious to the infra-red scan. Maybe another bomb shelter? There was that decommissioned hangar at the far end of the secondary runway. Logically, there would have been people working in it, so they’d have needed some place to go if German raiders came calling, and Tony hadn’t looked for a shelter when he checked the place out because it was basically a ruin that hadn’t fallen down yet. But he was running out of options, running out of places to check out that might have “happy ending” scrawled somewhere on the list.

This was taking too fucking long.

Tony closed his eyes and bit back a noise he was pretty sure he didn’t want to broadcast back to the Tower. “Privacy mode, J,” he got out, once he dared to let his lower lip loose from between his teeth, and thank god fasting the little blue indicator popped up in the corner of the HUD and Tony could start swearing. The words wouldn’t have mattered. Hell, the rest of the Avengers had heard him turn the air blue plenty of times. But he didn’t want to share the gasps that weren’t quite sobs (or maybe they were, but he wasn’t crying, he wasn’t, honest. Stark men are iron and all that shit and you know what happened to the Tin Man when the let himself get damp. Wasn’t like a girl with a dog was gonna come by with an oilcan any time soon.) And he didn’t want to the Avengers to hear the way his voice cracked on some of the words, soaring up into octaves he’d left behind this first year at MIT. But fuckitalltohell, Tony had promised he’d make sure everyone at Fitton was safe, or at least _found_ , and the search for Lester was taking too goddamn long.

Tony was failing at the one thing Martin had asked him to do.


	60. Chapter 60

Tony ran out of steam before he ran out of vocabulary. If there was one thing that getting drunk at parties in just about every country on the planet did it was teach you how to say “fuck this shit” in a whole lot of languages. (And what the partying hadn’t provided, working with Nat and Clint had supplied.) But the profanity did its magic all the same, distracting him long enough for the brain cells that were trying to actually solve the problem to rest and reset and reboot. He couldn’t find somebody here? Well, then maybe that somebody wasn’t here to be found. People were portable after all, especially injured people, and if there was one true rule about computers it was that sooner or later, everything gets typed into the wrong slot. Especially when the fan and the feces were in play.

If it got typed in at all. 

He nudged the comm. “J? Give me a direct line to Pepper.” JARVIS could hack into the local hospitals’ and emergency teams’ databases, if necessary, but Pepper was better at getting answers without setting off alarms or raising hackles. 

“Yes, Tony?” Pepper’s hair was escaping from her ponytail, and she was beginning to get smudges under her eyes, but by the cup in her hand she was definitely better caffeinated than Tony right now. 

“Got an idea, but you’re in a better place to work it,” he said, watching with longing as she took another sip of coffee. “Is that my Kona in your cup?”

“No, it’s the Ethiopian blend Bruce wanted to try.” Pepper said, undistracted by Tony’s caffeine addiction. “What’s the idea?”

Tony shook his head and made himself concentrate. “I’m wondering if David Lester got taken out of here by one of the ambulances or buses, and his name got screwed up or went unreported. Can you take that as a hypothesis and run with it for me?”

“Do you know his full name?”

“David Alan Lester.” Tony had seen it on the airport manager’s clipboard.

“Hm. All three names could be first names or last names.” Pepper put down her cup and pulled up a keyboard. “Has anyone tried calling his phone or checked his social media sites yet?”

“I have no idea,” Tony admitted. “JARVIS?”

“There are 13 David Lesters with an internet presence in England, four of whom live near enough to Fitton for a reasonable commute,” JARVIS answered instantly. “Only one of those four has posted anything since the disaster began, and that individual appears to be no more than fifteen years of age.”

“JARVIS and I can do the stabs in the dark, Tony,” Pepper said. “But it will go a lot faster if you can get more information for us. Are any of his co-workers available? Other than Carolyn? I think I convinced her to take a nap last time we talked.”

“His boss is still on the field, but if I go talk to him I’m going to get pulled into doing repairs,” Tony said.

“Worth it,” Pepper opined. “You’ll find out more about where and what the damage is if you can get hands-on with it, and JARVIS can use the additional data to improve the simulation. Besides, you’ve probably had more sleep, more recently, than anyone else there.”

“It’ll take a while,” Tony pointed out. “I won’t be able to get back to Coventry till morning.”

“Martin will need you there more in the morning,” Pepper said. “Besides, the last time I checked, they’d given him something to help him get some sleep. If you went back now, he wouldn’t even know you were there.

 _I’d know_ , Tony thought. But Pepper was right. (Pepper was always right.) And getting the lights back on would feel a shitload more useful than flying around hoping the scans will show him something useful in the dark. “You’ll tell me if that changes?” he asks, although he knows she’s will.

“Yes,” Pepper says. “And I’ll tell you if... or, when... I confirm that the Leslie A. Davis that was checked in three hours ago at the hospital in Fitton with a head injury turns out to be your missing engineer.”


	61. Chapter 61

Mariam had only closed her eyes for a minute. She was pretty sure it had only been a minute, but somehow in that minute she had ended up curled into the shelter of the largest piece of fuselage with something warm draped over her. And the wind had stopped howling or tugging at her clothes, even if the rain still clattered in a desultory way on the metal above her head. 

She started to fumble blindly through her pockets for her mobile before remembering that she’d left it in her locker because she wasn’t meant to carry it on duty, which was probably good because it would be even soggier and muddier than she was if she’d been carrying it. But she wanted to know the time and she didn’t have... oh, that was right. She did have a watch. She’d needed a watch (the job would give her a radio) and Mum had given her one with all the bells and whistles and it was on her left wrist so it was right there if only she could pry open an eye long enough to look.

3:27.

A.M.

She’d been asleep for nearly an hour.

_Oh, fuck!_


	62. Chapter 62

Jack didn’t know whether to feel amused or guilty when Bah popped up from the corner where she’d been napping, wide-eyed with alarm, the silver emergency blanket crackling audibly as she crumpled it into a hasty approximation of a square. It wasn’t her fault that she was trying to play catch up. He’d told her to take a five-minute break and then damn near forgotten she was there when they hadn’t needed her skinny ass to work through the wreckage to get at any more living casualties. (And he sure as hell hadn’t been about to ask the kid to risk her neck retrieving any of the dead ones.)

Besides, he’d been listening to the God of Thunder singing an epic funeral dirge for most of the last forty minutes while they’d bagged and tagged the dead. They’d been damn lucky, and he knew it, to have more injured than killed (though he wasn’t sure what the final tally was going to be, given the condition of some of the survivors who’d been closest to the explosions) but there were already sixty-two body bags lined up in quiet rows in the main hangar and he was just as glad that Bah had missed out on putting most of them over there. She was a good kid, and it had been one hell of a first day on the job. Which reminded him.

“Bah!” 

“Sir?” She pulled herself up to what would look like “attention” if you’d never done a stint in the Army. 

“What time do you go on shift tomorrow?”

She blinked at him, and licked her lips before pulling a face at the taste of mud and fuel from the thin layer of grime that covered everyone. “Er... Seven in the morning, sir.”

“Don’t show up.” Jack gave the panic a moment to bloom. She was going to be good, no question, but there was no reason to let her get cocky. “Twelve hours between shifts is the legal minimum for trainees,” he reminded her before she could protest or wilt. (Although it he’d enjoyed watching her face as she seesawed between the two options.) “Looks like you’ll be on nights after this.”

Her eyebrow went up even as her shoulders relaxed and she fought back a grin. “So I can work till 7, then. Right, sir?” she asked, even though it would mean she’d be twenty-four hours on the job.

Jack didn’t bother fighting back his own grin as he jerked a thumb in the direction of the cluster of food trucks that had started showing up once the wind died down. “Get something to eat and some caffeine first. Cream and sugar, even if you usually take it black.”

“I like cream and sugar,” Bah told him, running a hand through her hair like she thought it was going to help. 

“I don’t,” Jack told her. Coffee or tea, he liked it best black as the bottom of a coal miner’s heart. “But nights like this I take ‘em anyway. You can go easy on the cream, but pour in the sugar till the spoon stands up on its own and I’ll bless you for it.” He knew he should probably eat something, knew it would be better for Bah if she saw him take on some real food instead of teaching her bad habits, but he didn’t have an appetite, and wouldn’t until he could scrub the night away. He saw Thor coming back from the hangar and latched onto the distraction. “Take Thor with you. That much man needs to refuel now and then.”


	63. Chapter 63

Tony was pretty sure that the transformer he’d just finished fixing would work if he re-rigged the power line, but that wasn’t going to be a good idea until he’d gotten the pole upright, and that meant getting back into the armor with his clothes soggy and full of wire splinters and strange oxidation residues which was going to make for an itchy, uncomfortable ride. But that’s what happened when you messed with decades old tech. God, when was the last time anyone had upgraded the infrastructure of this place? History was all very fine and well, and he knew the Brits were proud of using stuff that was a thousand years old, but that worked better with castles and shit, that were, you know, made out of stone. You could piss on a stone for a long time before you couldn’t depend on it to be solid and reliable and fucking functional. Which was more than Tony would be able to say about the electrical system of Fitton airfield or himself for that matter if he didn’t get his ass off the ground and go find a little privacy for a leak, now he’d made the mistake of thinking about pissing. And then he could go find some coffee and refuel his bladder, which might make him feel like he was awake.

He looked up at the suit. “Jarv? Give me a hand up.”

“Of course, sir.” The empty suit extended an arm and Tony reached up to grab the gauntlet. JARVIS pulled him upright with ease. Tony considered having JARVIS try to reset the pole with the suit, but as good as JARVIS had gotten at flying, or blowing things up, the AI wasn’t really programmed for construction work. Besides, the suit didn’t have as much oomph without Tony inside it, and JARVIS was using most of his processing power for scanning the damage and refining the simulation. 

The AI had enough circuits left over to ask if Tony wanted to get back into the suit, though, and Tony had to think about it. Running around in sodden socks had lost its charm three seconds after he’d started doing it, but he didn’t have the manual dexterity in the suit to do the work that needed doing and he couldn’t just wear the boots of the suit without deactivating the whole thing and losing contact with JARVIS. 

Coffee, he reminded himself. Thinking always went better with coffee.

He debated getting into the suit to travel, but he really didn’t want to get all the interfaces inside it full of dirty bits and pieces that might compromise the connections, so he started walking, with JARVIS clunking along behind.

He managed not to stub a toe or step on anything sharp as he made his way toward the cluster of lights at the end of the runway. That’s where the coffee was. And look, that’s where Thor was too. Bonus! Maybe the big lug had seen something Tony hadn’t yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There'll be some delays, as I'm travelling (London Worldcon!) and my luggage is lost. But I'll try to get some bits up anyway. And I might even get a chance to go up near Coventry to get a bit of local atmosphere next week!


	64. Chapter 64

Thor was grateful to the little healer for leading him to the mobile feast which sheltered beneath the wings of one of the still intact airplanes. He had not thought to pause in the grim work of honouring the dead, but rest and refreshment he required, no less than the healers and emergency crews, even though he had not striven in battle beforehand. Night was well advanced, here, and his day had begun long before. 

The food trucks had brought offerings both similar and different to the vendors Thor had come to know in New York; hamburgers and doughnuts, sarnies and pasties, and much much more. Men and women in bright reflective clothing clustered near each truck, bearing away packets rich with the scents of meat or fruit, or finding places beneath the airplanes lined up nearby where they could fall upon their meals without the rain falling upon their heads. The merchants offered their wares free of obligation, saying all had been paid for. The bounty was much appreciated, although it had seemed best to accept what was first offered. A doorstop, it was called, a generous serving of bread, filled with sausages and salad topped with a brown sauce which seemed to have no name. The healer had quested further, returning with a kebap for herself and a tray with a pot and two cups of beverage meant to be shared. They set it upon the hood of a car and stood as they ate, grateful for such small comforts as were to be had without regretting the absence of chairs and tables and other amenities long since fallen victim to the wind. The relentless hum of the generator which powered a stand of lights nearby soothed away the need for conversation without numbing the ears as the storm had done, yet there was no need to talk. The time for haste had passed. Grim work might lay ahead, but it could wait. It could wait.

“More tea?” Young Mariam enquired, and Thor nodded. He liked this way of serving tea, which made it so like coffee in its humour and yet so unlike in taste. He held forth his cup to be refilled. No sooner had she done so than Tony Son of Stark strode into the pool of light and snagged the cup away, putting it to his lips and drinking deeply of the draught. Behind him came the suit of iron, taking its position near the edge of shadow, eyes gleaming white in the darkness, raindrops glistening as they trickled down its metal surface.

Thor laughed at the look upon his friend’s face when Tony emerged from the cup. “This,” said the dark-haired one, “is not coffee.”

“Indeed not,” said Thor. “This is the brew of the country. Would you insult our hosts?”

“There must be coffee,” Tony insisted. “Martin likes coffee. He wouldn’t like coffee if there wasn’t coffee here.” He turned and appealed to Mariam. “There’s coffee, isn’t there? Tell me there’s coffee.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still travelling, but I have seen much, and it will be good for little details! Thanks for your patience.


	65. Chapter 65

Martin had lost track of the number of times he had coughed himself awake and how many times he had only dreamt of doing so. He was pretty sure he was awake this time. He hoped so at least. If he had started dreaming about Arthur snoring in a sarong, then he needed to have a Word with his subconscious.

Arthur had explained about the sarong, naturally, but in the way that Arthur explained things, which meant that Martin still didn’t understand much except the part about Tony being brilliant and knowing how to do _anything_. That was a given, since it was Tony, who really was brilliant and not only in the Arthurian sense of the word. And no, Martin was not going waste his scant energy on wishing that it were Tony sitting on the chair by the bed, drooling ungracefully into the sheets near Martin’s hip. Not much anyway, not while Tony was busy doing important hero things because Martin had told him to go do them. All right, maybe a little energy, and he’d waste it on wishing he’d been selfish and asked Tony to stay.

He coughed again, and again, until sparks glinted in the darkness behind his eyelids. He coughed and wanted the nurse to come and crank up the head of the bed and adjust his pillows and call for the doctor who might give him something to make the coughing stop. But all he managed to do was wake up Arthur, who was unexpectedly talented at pillows and ice chips, although strangely diminished and silent this deep in the night, exhaustion replacing his usual enthusiasm. Martin felt like he ought to say something reassuring, because he was meant to be responsible for his crew, but he didn’t know what to say and in any case he didn’t have any breath to say it.

He opened his eyes and Arthur was gone; opened them again and Arthur was back, bringing the nurse and a warm blanket to spread over Martin. Literally warm, Martin realized, as the heat soaked into his chest and began to undo the knots that had tightened with each cough.

“Drink this,” the nurse said. Or was it “Drink me”? Because although the stuff didn’t taste of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, _or_ hot buttered toast, Martin was beginning to shrink away, back into the confusion of his dreams.


	66. Chapter 66

Jack wandered over to the shelter of the big passenger plane where Tony Stark was holding court and worked his way through the gaggle of onlookers until he could tap his errant trainee on the shoulder. “Where’s my tea, Bah?”

She flinched guiltily, but produced a paper cup with a plastic lid on it. “Sorry boss. I’ll get you another one. I think this one has gone cold.”

He took it anyway and pried off the lid. “As long as it’s got caffeine,” he said, and gulped down half the contents at once. Tepid, yes, but strong and sweet, and soothing to a throat that had seen too much smoke and too much shouting. “Could be worse,” he admitted and then waved the cup at the festivities. “What are we doing?”

“Trying to help figure out what happened,” said Bah.

“Plane fell out of the sky,” Jack said. “The AAIB* will take it from there.”

Bah pointed to a tiny, elderly man in a suspiciously tidy Burberry. “That’s it,” she said, and then clarified, “I mean, he’s them. The Investigation Branch. Or one of them, anyway. But I think Iron Man has already figured out a lot of it.”

As if his name had caught his ear, Stark looked up to see who Bah was talking to and nodded at Jack as if he were an old acquaintance. “I already know what caused the crash,” he said, addressing them both. “At least, I think I do. At this point I’m just trying to figure out how Martin ended up in that ditch.” For a man who was meant to be a billionaire, Stark bore a strong resemblance to a half-drowned orphan. Someone had scrounged him up the kind of emergency poncho you got from Boots,but the clear plastic didn’t hide the fact that he’d been drenched and his clothes didn’t quite fit. And Jack was going to make sure the man had boots before he went back to work. And a helmet.

“What did cause the crash?” Jack asked, moving up so he could get a clearer look at the assorted bits of this and that which Stark was laying out on the ground in a pattern that might represent the airfield from above if you used a hefty dose of imagination. Best to keep Stark busy talking while Jack tried to figure out where to drum up some protective gear.

“Bolt from the blue,” Stark said. “Not that it was exactly blue -- it had been raining for a while. But there always has to be a first, and in this case, the first was a lightning strike,” he got up and went over to a point beyond his model. “Here. It fried a transponder and killed the power to the airport, which I can prove, because I’ve seen the remains, but the real problem is that it was in arms reach of the plane coming in to land.”

“That’s not proven,” objected the man from the AAIB. 

Stark turned to look at the Iron Man armour which was standing silently nearby. “JARVIS?”

An English voice answered from within the suit. (Jack was glad he was too tired to look startled.) “A review of the data will confirm the timing. Under normal circumstances examination of the debris field would determine whether the lightning actually struck the aircraft or merely startled the pilots into an unfortunate low altitude maneuver.”

“But these aren’t normal circumstances,” Stark interjected. “Between the storm and the rescue effort, things got moved around. Which is where you guys come in. Jarvis and the Avengers have made a model from the scans I’ve done in the suit, but that data was collected hours later. You guys were here on the scene within minutes -- a couple of you were even already here -- so you can confirm or disprove some assumptions we’ve made.”

“The interviews with personnel at the crash site should be recorded,” the AAIB man protested faintly, clearly already half inclined to give in. 

“And they will be. JARVIS can give you the complete set whenever you want.” Jack was beginning to understand why Tony Stark got everything he wanted. The man didn’t have an “off” button.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The Air Accidents Investigation Branch http://www.aaib.gov.uk/home/index.cfm 
> 
> Wandering the internet I've seen people say lightning can strike anywhere from 10 miles to 25 miles away from a storm. For safety's sake, if you can hear thunder, assume that you're within range of a bolt and seek shelter.
> 
> If you're not trying to clean up a plane crash, anyway...
> 
> http://www.crh.noaa.gov/images/gid/WCM/safety/lightning.pdf 
> 
> http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/lightning-on-clear-day-110729.htm


	67. Chapter 67

Turned out that people who are trained to write after action reports on disasters are pretty good at noticing things. Times. Positions. Corroborating details, like the number under the wheels of the ambulance they were loading up. The direction of the wind. The shouts through the rain. The smell of jet fuel splattered randomly underfoot, miraculously unignited, as they ushered passengers and flight crews away from the rows of parked planes and the darkened terminal. The fear that the fire would spread; the relief as the rain diluted the fuel that remained until it was only thin, fading rainbows on the surface of the rainswept tarmac.

It was kind of unnerving actually. Especially if you didn’t have to lean too hard on your imagination to fill in the things they didn’t describe. (The bodies. The blood. The smoke. The screams...) Tony knew he was going to have some spectacular nightmares if he ever dared sleep again. Which he’d have to, sometime, because he was getting thickheaded with exhaustion already, and he hadn’t even been awake and working as long as these guys had. But this was okay. This talking and not having to move around was kind of like a chance to rest, wasn’t it? The pretty young trainee paramedic, (not Marimba, Tony, and no you don’t get to thank her by giving her one, behave, said Pepper from the back of his skull) Mariam Bah, had scarpered off somewhere after her boss had talked to her, but the rest of them were hanging around, listening and contributing more answers while they noshed on food truck food and drank from cups that steamed caffeine. 

He let the guy from the Brit equivalent of the FAA ask the questions. Carruthers. (Tony had never expected that there were really people named Carruthers, but then again one of the brightest new hires in the Engineering Division at Stark Industries was named Divineprophecy Jones so his brain could just shut up now because he did not want to think about names and all the ways that they could be twisted into sophomoric jokes and dammit why did Crieff have to rhyme with grief?)

In any case, Carruthers was good at asking the right kind of questions, which left Tony free to contemplate the new data and rearrange his napkin and papercup origami planes while JARVIS recorded answers and used the targeting laser to sketch the outlines of the airfield over his makeshift model like a kid using a sparkler to write names in the misty air. The light show was burning a ton of juice and Tony was going to have to climb back into the suit to recharge the batteries from the arc reactor at some point, but it was hella impressive. Not as detailed as the holoprojectors in Stark Tower, but damn fine for a jury rig. 

For a moment Tony lost the thread of the conversation as he considered how to fit a holoprojector into the suit. Then Thor nudged him, gently for Thor, which meant Tony only travelled a couple of feet to one side.

“You have forgotten the bus,” the god said, offering a bolt that had strayed from its home to represent the vehicle. 

“The bus?” Tony asked, placing it where Thor indicated it should go. He hadn’t seen a bus, but given that the point of having a bus was wheels and seats and stuff, that wasn’t too surprising. And hadn’t Carolyn been stuck on a bus somewhere during the night? “Was it an airfield bus or like, a city bus from somewhere else?” Not that it mattered all that much, but if JARVIS was going to update the big model back in New York, it’d be nice if he got it right.

“Tour bus, actually,” Jack Timothy contributed. “We brought it in to take everyone who wasn’t an ambulance case to hospital so they could get properly evaluated.” He kept giving Tony the kind of “you-aren’t-okay” and “come-here-to-my-medical-grabby-hands” looks that Bruce was so fond of. But he was good at the providing fresh data part of things, and everyone else was following his lead and helping, so on the whole Tony was glad he was still lurking. (He still hadn’t found a chance to thank the man for rescuing Martin, after all.) And he knew stuff, details, like the name of the tour bus company, which JARVIS duly noted for the model.

“Our young Friend Arthur was aboard the bus when I arrived,” Thor said. “Although he quickly disembarked to speak his heart to me. He was most concerned about Captain Crieff.”

Tony scrubbed at his face with the heels of his hands and wished he had something more potent than the watery coffee in his cup. Scotch. Scotch would be good. But hell, he’d settle for a pint of espresso if it was on offer. “Arthur.” He dug his fingers into his hair and tugged at it, hoping that would wake up his brain. “I didn’t even think about asking Arthur what happened to Martin after the plane crashed. I got completely distracted by trying to figure out what had happened to his clothes.”

“Martin’s clothes?” Thor asked.

“No, Arthur’s.” Tony opened his mouth to explain and then closed it again, because there was no way that he could imagine making Thor understand what had happened without lots of handwaving and diagrams and possibly a couple of tankards of mead, and half the people here were already looking sideways at his socks. He looked up at the god with what he hoped was a sincere and unbefuddled expression. “I don’t suppose he told you what happened. To Martin, that is?”

Thor shook his head, sending water in all directions. “He did not know. That was the cause of his distress.”

“Damn it.” Tony poked at the wad of chewing gum that was standing in for the fallen fire engine. “Carolyn said that Arthur told her Martin ran off while they were trying to help the fire crew. She said he said that he said he’d be right back, but I still don’t know why he went.” That wasn’t the clearest sentence in the world, but Tony knew what he meant, and luckily, Thor had All-Speak to help him parse out the sense of it.

“He went to fetch a forklift.”

Tony blinked. “Forklift?” he repeated. This was the first he’d heard about a forklift. “He went to get a forklift?” A forklift would make sense. The MJN crew couldn’t lift the fire engine by themselves. Hell, the fire engine was still on its side, now, even if they’d managed to get the pump working and run the engines and hoses through it to fight the fire. But a forklift? Where the hell did Martin mean to get a forklift? Tony couldn’t remember seeing one during his flyovers. 

“That is what Arthur told me upon my arrival,” Thor said. 

“JARVIS?” Tony got up and went to tap the suit’s shoulder. “Have we got a forklift on the scan?”

“Yes, sir, two. But my scans show that this forklift,” JARVIS lit the location, way the hell down at the other end of the runway, “is still loaded with a pallet of luggage from one of the passenger jets. And this forklift,” he lit a spot near the wreckage, “is, as far as I know, an asset of the rescue teams, brought in some time after the crash.”

“You’re looking for a forklift?” Bah was back, her arms full of rain gear and rubber boots.

“Yes,” Tony turned to her. He wasn’t about to go into Thor says that Arthur said that and all, but she sounded like she knew something. “Have you seen one?”

“Yes,” she said, and bit her lip. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Show me.”


	68. Chapter 68

It wasn’t that simple. It couldn’t be, really, not with Jack wanting Mr. Stark to put on the gear Mariam had brought for him, and Colonel Carruthers wanting the Iron Man armour to stay and keep recording the interviews he was conducting, now that he’d got started, and everyone else listening in and trying to pretend they didn’t care. But Thor insisted that Mr. Stark put on the rain gear and the boots, and the JARVIS person talking through the suit insisted that it could stay and collect data, if someone with a camera could be found, and that reminded everyone that there was still a truck from the news people parked by the gate and it was just a matter of seeing if anyone inside it was still awake. 

All of which meant that when Mariam finally got a chance to lead the way to the tangle of wreckage where she thought she’d seen a forklift she was trailing a lot more people than just Tony Stark.

“I’m really not sure,” she admitted nervously, as they walked. “I mean, I think it’s a forklift. I can’t think of what else it might be. But I could only see part of it, and even that part was kind of, well, broken.”

“It’s worth looking,” Mr. Stark said, giving her a brief distracted smile. “It’s more to go on than we had before.” 

“But what difference does it make?” Mariam asked. 

He took her by the elbow, not that either of them really needed the support. When he answered his voice was low, pitched for her ears alone. “Martin doesn’t remember how he wound up in that ditch. And I don’t want him listening to the bozos who think he ran away because he was scared.”

Mariam would have run. She knew that. She’d wanted to run ever since they’d arrived and by that time the explosions had mostly stopped. But she wasn’t a superhero.

“You’d love him anyway, though, wouldn’t you?” She hadn’t meant to ask it aloud, for all that she wanted to know the answer. The reporter at the hospital had explained, but she hadn’t had time to believe it, not yet. People like Tony Stark didn’t fall in love with people from places like Fitton, did they? But the man next to her was real enough, and she could feel his hand trembling.

“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”


	69. Chapter 69

Tony knew he’d hesitated before answering, but he knew too, that he was telling the truth. It didn’t matter. It really didn’t. What was it to _him_ if Martin had taken one good look at disaster and death and decided to run for the hills? 

But he knew it would matter to Martin.

And it didn’t square, did it? Tony couldn’t reconcile the idea of a man who would leave a friend -- or even an acquaintance -- dying for lack of help with the the man who had dialled the right number and called for help before he’d done so much as seek shelter. It might be just that Martin had rehearsed what to do in the face of an emergency in his head that calling in the trained responders was automatic (and Steve Rogers and his insistence on boring practice drills had demonstrated the power of repetition over genius when it came to automaticity, Tony would admit to almost anyone but Cap.) Sure, Martin had sounded frantic during that call, but he’d acted, promptly, and decisively.

Besides, Tony was almost certain that Martin had done something to cut off the chain reaction of exploding airplanes. And a forklift -- if it existed -- would explain how he’d managed to do it. It was such a tempting solution. Tony could practically reach out and touch it.

It might even be true.

But he couldn’t prove it, not yet. And he needed to, because without solid proof, without some inarguable physical evidence, it was just a theory. And no matter how well Tony argued for the possibility that Martin had saved some fragment of the day, no matter how well he extrapolated from the available data, without proof Martin would never forgive himself for the certainty that he had left a man to die


	70. Chapter 70

Andrew Barrow had managed to get some sleep after the midnight report. He’d have never stayed in the business this long if he couldn’t nap just about anywhere, and he’d begun his day with a pre-dawn fire on the far side of the county. He’d roused briefly whilst Mike was attempting to get a shot of Iron Man flying all over the airfield, but they’d given it up as a bad job and decided to wait for daylight. The van was positively comfortable after so many hours in the wind and rain, and there wouldn’t be very many viewers this time of night even if the power hadn’t gone out in so many places.

But that was before he and Mike had been startled awake by a rapping on the windshield and looked out to see Thor waving insistently for them to come out. He still wasn’t quite sure why he was trailing after Tony Stark and assorted paramedics, but even half awake he could scent a story in the air. He adjusted his earpiece and checked his microphone before turning his face toward the camera. “Ready,” he said, and his director came back straight away.

“You’re on the air.”


	71. Chapter 71

Clint noticed first, naturally, and leaned over Pepper’s shoulder to point out one of the newsfeeds running at the periphery of the living room. “Isn’t that Tony?”

She glanced up from the data she’d been correlating, and frowned. From this distance all she could see was anonymous figures in the now-familiar greens and yellows and reds of the English emergency services, lines of reflective tape shimmering bright on sleeves and shoulders as they moved in the glare of a portable camera’s lights. She dismissed the big hologram into the corner and pulled the newsfeed forward.

“Hey,” Bruce began to protest, but he quieted as Pepper muted the other feeds and cranked up the sound on the news.

“...has just waved over George Warden, the senior airfield engineer,” came the reporter’s voice _sotto voce_ as the other Avengers looked up from their tasks. “We’ll see if we can get close enough to listen in.”

The camera pushed forward through the straggle of walkers, focussing on a trio near the front. One of them was Tony. He was swimming in an overly large jacket, and wearing something that looked like a cross between a hard hat and a motorcycle helmet, but there was no mistaking the way he moved his arms to talk, or the sound of his voice.

“Essentially, we’re just trying to make sure we’ve got a clear understanding of what happened, while we’ve still got the input from the people who were first on the ground.”

“That won’t include me,” Warden, an older man whose eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, glanced back at the camera uncertainly before finishing his thought. “I was in my office when the first plane came down, and by the time I managed to get out the door it looked like half the field was on fire.”

“Before or after the last plane exploded?” Tony asked.

Pepper knew she wasn’t the only one caught up now, waiting for Warden’s answer. The others were just as absorbed. But she hoped she was the only one who had caught the note of “I’ll just leap off this convenient ledge without checking to see if there’s a conclusion around to catch me” in Tony’s voice. _Dammit, Tony,_ she found herself thinking. _What are you after, and why on earth do you think it’s a good idea to take the chance of not finding it on a live broadcast?_


	72. Chapter 72

George wasn’t sure why Tony Stark seemed to think his answer was so important, but then again, George was so tired at this point he didn’t have the strength to care. 

“Before, but only just.” He couldn’t say if it were the shockwave or just the shock of that last big explosion which had sent him to the ground, but he’d found himself clinging the pavement all the same. He pointed toward the building where his office was, halfway down the field. “I was clear over there, so I didn’t have that great a view.” Hadn’t had any view at all, until he’d managed to pry his eyes open and risk raising his head, and that had taken forever. But there hadn’t been another explosion after all, and the shame of hearing other people in motion had finally overridden the fear. “And afterwards my first priority was trying to get the emergency power systems working.” Not that he could. The fuel line to the generators had been cut by falling debris.

Stark’s face fell. “So you couldn’t see if there was a forklift out here, then.”

“Well, there had to have been,” George pointed out. “Carolyn requested secure space to store a pallet in until next Tuesday and they would have needed a forklift to transfer it from Gertie to my maintenance hangar.” He’d only been involved in the satellite phone call because the request had meant moving some of his equipment into a different corner, but he hadn’t minded. Douglas had promised a bottle of very good Scotch in trade.

“Next Tuesday?” Stark repeated, blinking.

“From what I understand, MJN was going to fly out to Russia tomorrow.” George remembered what time it was. “Today.” He looked around at the devastated airfield. “Guess that’s not going to happen now.”


	73. Chapter 73

For a moment, Tony’s priorities went into a tangle. He wanted to dance, because dammit, there was a forklift, after all, or there had been, and what’s more, if Warden had it right, the forklift must have been parked close enough to make sense for Martin to go after it. Which was fantastic, except for the “I put a credit card with no limit on it into a suitcase that was going to be sitting in an airport hangar till next Tuesday” alert, which was not going to make Pepper happy at all. And also the “oh, shit, MJN is going to go broke by the time they can get back into the air again” problem, which would upset Martin, who would probably think it was his fault for getting hurt and no, Tony wasn’t going to let that happen, not if he could help it, but just giving them money was probably out. And there was a soupçon of “oh, shit, I have a tv camera looking at me I should probably say something,” which should probably take priority, really, because he was pretty sure that it wasn’t that late in New York and people were probably watching. Probably.


	74. Chapter 74

Carolyn assured the team of four Belgian businesspeople that they would be just as comfortable in her guest rooms as in the overcrowded waiting rooms of the hospital, or one of the equally overcrowded hotels nearby. She was more than a little surprised at herself for making the offer, truth be told, but it seemed that the kindness of strangers was contagious. The nurses on Douglas’s ward had offered rides to homes or hotels, once their counterparts had arrived through the weakening storm, and one thing had led to another, somehow. But it would be good business, wouldn’t it, to have people who flew charters grateful to her? If she still had a company for them to charter once was all was said and done.

But the offer had been made, and as five of them wouldn’t fit all together, the nurse who had offered her a ride was off finding another nurse with a bigger car, and that meant waiting again, when all Carolyn wanted to do was be home, preferably with a dog and a boychild rattling around the place for company. (Well, the Belgians could serve as company, anyway, which meant she could sleep without a golf club tucked under her pillow. Not that Gordon was likely to come swanning back to the house in bad weather, but she’d never quite lost the habit of making sure he’d regret it if he did.) So here they all were, clutching the possessions they’d salvaged from disaster (she’d never been so glad that her purse had a strap) and waiting to be told that their transportation was ready.

Something penetrated through her all-too-early in the morning fog, and she looked to the television that was chattering mindlessly in the corner of the waiting room. Someone had mentioned MJN Air, hadn’t they? She pressed closer for a better look just in time to see the camera turn from George Warden to Tony Stark.

“I don’t expect anyone will be flying out of here tomorrow,” the billionaire said, with a slightly distracted air. He was moving as he spoke, following a cluster of emergency personnel past twisted pieces of wreckage. In the background Carolyn could hear the rumble of generators. “But if MJN has a commission then Stark Industries will see it covered.”

“Oh, will you?” Carolyn asked the screen. Because Miss Potts had mentioned nothing of the sort. And Carolyn wasn’t entirely comfortable with the notion. (Not that she wouldn’t accept the offer. She had a son to keep fed after all.) But Stark was waving away the consideration as if it meant nothing to him.

“The important thing is figuring out what happened here. Finding the forklift is the start.”

 _Forklift?_ Hadn’t Arthur said something about a forklift? She’d been so worried about Douglas that she hadn’t taken notice.

“I don’t see what good that will do,” George protested.

“Look,” Stark said, running a hand across his face. “With the wind where it was, there could have been a chain reaction that went all the way down the field, along the parked planes. It started,” he waved a hand at something offscreen. “The plane that crashed set off another one, and that one got pushed into another one and more things blew up. But something or someone got in the way of that chain reaction. It wasn’t the wind. The wind was blowing in the chain reaction’s favor. But it could have been that forklift.” He paused, with the look of a man about to dive off a very high platform into a sponge. “It could have been Martin.”


	75. Chapter 75

“Our Martin?” Warden scoffed, and Tony had to remind himself that socking someone in the jaw with a camera looking on was probably not a good idea. Before he could unclench his fists and restart his brain to come to Martin’s defense Bah piped up.

“Why not?” she said, quite clearly. “Captain Crieff struck me as a very practical sort. And I wasn’t seeing him at his best.”

Tony saw the cameraman turn to get a good shot of her, and bit down hard on the temptation to grin. A pretty girl was always going to make a good impression.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a drabble this time, I'm afraid. Halloween is one of my busiest times of the year and I'm swamped!


	76. Chapter 76

Mariam wasn’t sure why she’d spoken up, but the grateful look she got from Tony Stark more than made up for the feeling that her face was on fire. “In any case, you weren’t close enough to see, so you don’t really know any more than we do. Besides, we’re almost there.” She stopped by the bit of wreckage where she’d been taking a nap. “Excuse me,” she told the others, and went belly down to crawl back underneath. 

A moment later, Tony joined her, with the cameraman trying desperately to make a third. “What are we doing?” the billionaire asked casually, shifting just enough to the right to allow the light from the camera to reach both their faces.

“Getting the direction.” She pulled out her flashlight so she could point him the right way. From here, she could see the next tangle of airplane over, backlit by one of the temporary lights. The shapes that her brain insisted on identifying as the lifting bars of a forklift were still where she remembered them. Now that she was really looking, she was pretty sure she could see wheels too small for an airplane, too. “There. Do you see it? If that’s not a forklift I don’t know what it is. Some kind of ground vehicle.”

“Yeah.” Tony said after a beat, and then rested his head against the ground before speaking again. “I think the best plan is for you to stay here and keep your light pointed at it while I go around to the other side and have you steer me until I get there.”

“Fair enough.”

The cameraman, having heard, backed away, and the two of them were left in shadow. Tony hadn’t lifted his head yet. “I can’t see it,” he admitted quietly. “Are you sure it’s there?”

Mariam thought about how long she’d stared at the wreckage before closing her eyes to rest and realized that to anyone looking for the first time would only see reflections and shadows, twisted into nonsense by the force of the explosion. She’d at least had the advantage of having walked past the mess a few times before trying to decipher it. No wonder he was having doubts.

“I’m sure,” she said, trying to put all the confidence he didn’t seem to have into the words. “And as soon as you get close enough, you’ll be sure too.”


	77. Chapter 77

Tony twisted onto his side to look at her, his eyes straining in the sparse light, but he couldn’t see anything but sincerity. Which was good, because he didn’t feel like dealing with any Pollyanna bullshit right now. “You’re sure,” he said, and it wasn’t a question, because she was sure, he could see it even in such deep shadow that in all honesty he wasn’t seeing much more than a silhouette with the glimmer of reflected light where her eyes should be. “You know,” he said, “I’m going to owe you one hell of a thank you,” he said, and she ducked her head and mumbled something about just doing her job. 

It reminded him of Martin, suddenly. Of the way that Martin was so confident when it came to aviation and so uncertain when it came to his own self-worth. Martin, who didn’t even know about the people who’d thought he’d run away into the night, and never would, if Tony had anything to say about it. Because Martin _hadn’t_ run, and Tony would _prove_ it. He _would_.

He plastered on a smile before crawling backwards, out where the world could see. He still had work to do.


	78. Chapter 78

Andrew waved Mike ahead of him, slowing down a moment to wipe the rain off his microphone off-camera while everyone else started trailing after Tony Stark again. In spite of the cloud cover and the drizzle it was getting light enough to see which way the crowd was moving now, and he could make out the shapes of the wreckage in front of him and the planes and buildings behind. Stark was right. There was an odd demarcation between disaster and safety, and one that had nothing to do with where the two runways crossed. 

Andrew scurried (“hastened” his mental editor corrected) after the others, catching up in time to see Stark align himself with a torchbeam from below the nearby debris before walking away. They passed a tangle of metal and scorched plastic, and Stark paused to take his bearings again, speaking softly to someone via the earpiece he wore. The next jumble of wreckage lay ahead.

It was, Andrew decided at the light of a dozen torches revealed details, the nose cone of one of the larger jets, broken off from its parent plane by some titanic explosion and thrown askew so that the wheel assembly jutted at an angle to the sky. The cockpit was open to the air, instruments streaked with soot where the rain had failed to reach. Someone had spray-painted an X on the largest unbuckled bit of fuselage. There had been no casualties here;no one still aboard to try to correct the drift of the aircraft into the intersection of the runways. Andrew explained that to the audience, twenty years of practice letting him choose the best words even while his attention on the action.

“We’re going for a better angle and yes, yes! I see it. There is a forklift there!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not dead yet! (And my yuletide and holmestice stories are out of my hair.) 
> 
> Zurich day is coming! Has anyone been following the Cabin Pressure Advent? I found it late, but I am much amused anyway. http://cabinpressureadventcalendar.tumblr.com/


	79. Chapter 79

Tony looked up at the forklift tangled into the wreckage. It had been burned in the explosion, and half destroyed, to the point where the two forks didn’t even point in the quite the same direction anymore. They’d been jammed to either side of the main wheel strut and then run up the mast of the forklift nearly to the top. Without measuring, Tony couldn’t be positive, but he thought the airplanes wheel assembly might have been lifted off the ground, making it possible for the driver of the forklift to direct the motion of the entire aircraft. 

He wondered if Martin had been planning to use the forklift as a brake. It wouldn’t have worked; the plane was too heavy, especially with the wind it would have had behind it. “What were you thinking, Martin?” he said out loud as he studied the mess.

“You don’t know it was Martin,” George said. The airport engineer was standing close enough to hear. “Maybe the forklift was just in the way.”

“Would you leave it with the forks that far up the mast?”

“Well, no,” George conceded. “But don’t pin your hopes on something that doesn’t make any sense. That thing’s got a deadman switch. Martin would have had to stay on the forklift to do any good. And it might have been David. We still don’t know how he ended up in hospital.” 

Tony tried not to scowl. It didn’t sound like George was trying to deny the evidence, exactly, More like he was playing Devil’s Advocate to shield Tony from disappointment. “The deadman switch is a problem either way,” he pointed out. “Is it the pedal kind or the seat kind?”

“The seat,” George said. “When the operator gets up, the forklift engine cuts off.”

“So if we find something rigged to keep the seat in the down position we’re good,” Tony concluded, working his way around the tangle, looking for a way to either climb up to the place where the forklift cab was perched or tip the whole mess over to bring the cab down to where it could be safely investigated. He tapped the earbud to alert JARVIS. “Hey, J, I think I’m going to need the suit. And the suit, if you can get him to come along without fussing.”

“Mr. Carruthers has already expressed an interest in your investigations, sir. We shall join you shortly.”

Tony grinned. He didn’t need to listen in to know that JARVIS would be taking advantage of accent and demeanor to convince the Investigations board rep to play along. It amused him endlessly that the people who knew him and JARVIS both could tell who was in charge of the armor just by the way it held its shoulders. “Thanks, J.”

“Who is David?” The newsguy had been listening in, and like every other newsguy on the planet, he was full of questions. Tony tuned him out, letting Warden tell the tale of how his assistant had been taken to the hospital and then lost in the paperwork. It was Pepper who had solved that one anyway, and Tony had enough of a problem right in front of him. Like how to get a better look at the cab of the forklift.

“I could lift you to inspect it,” Thor offered, in what he probably thought was a discreet voice.

Tony glanced up at the giant Asgardian. Thor couldn’t help being the size of a baby elephant. “Thanks, but no thanks. The suit’s got better sensors and is a lot less likely to get cut on a sharp edge.”


	80. Chapter 80

Carolyn waved a hand to hush the nurse who was telling her that the car was waiting and leaned toward the television as if it would force the cameraman give her a better view of what was happening behind George. Tony and Thor were in what appeared to be a discussion with the armour and that wretched fusspot from the AAIB, Inspector Carruthers. She scowled, remembering a certain incident which had barely escaped drawing down the board’s censure. “You shan’t be able to blame this one on Arthur,” she muttered at the trenchcoated figure. “There’s not a noodle in sight.”


	81. Chapter 81

On the other side of the ocean, Pepper Potts leaned toward the holoscreen that was showing the video feed from Fitton, unaware that her body language echoed Carolyn’s three thousand and some odd miles away. “Get in the suit, Tony,” she murmured, wanting to see the health monitor widgets in the corner of JARVIS’s input screen light up with the numbers that would tell her just how over-excited and exhausted her former boss and best friend actually was. He had a manic harmonic overtone to his voice that she, at least, recognized all too well, and his hand kept coming up to tap nervously at the arc reactor. 

They were arguing about the best way to examine the forklift, seeing that it was embedded in a tangle of debris that must have flipped in the explosion, leaving it upside down well above anyone’s head. Inspector Carruthers had pointed out (fairly, Pepper had to admit) that Tony lacked both the training and the objectivity required to deal with what might be crucial evidence in the reconstruction of the incident. Tony thought that JARVIS’s objectivity ought to be sufficient, and Thor was taking umbrage at the suggestion that the son of Stark might be thought less than honorable.

The chirp of an incoming text on her phone startled her, but she threw the text up onto one of the screens. It wasn’t from a known number, but Pepper immediately recognized the style of her fellow CEO. “Tell them to stop dithering and use the de-icing truck from the hangar.”

Pepper didn’t waste time wondering whose phone Carolyn had co-opted this time. She called out “JARVIS? Tell Tony...”

“I have done so, Miss Potts,” JARVIS replied, and Pepper could see his reply appearing on the holoscreen as he anticipated her words.

“Thank you.”


	82. Chapter 82

The de-icing truck was at least twenty years old. Its tires were bald and its paint job was peeling, but it had a cherry picker for the hose on top of the tank with a decent sized basket and that’s all Tony cared about. The guy who had gone to fetch it (Dirk, Warden called him) pulled up so close that he actually nudged the debris when he set the outriggers. For a moment, Tony wondered if the whole mess was going to tip over and make the effort of getting the truck redundant, but it only rocked a little. Carruthers, the camera guy and the newsguy began climbing into the basket, along with Warden, who would be at the controls. 

Tony was going to watch from the suit. The heads up display was better than eyeballs any day of the week. He sat down on the running board of the truck to pull off the oversized boots he’d only just acquired. 

“Do you want me to hang on to those for you?” The older paramedic, Jack, was still hovering. So was Thor.

Tony passed over the boots and did his best not to scowl. “I’m not going to fall over, you know,” he said conversationally, because he did have some tact, honestly, and because he knew that Pepper and the other Avengers were probably watching the feed from the suit, so they’d hear it too.

Jack nodded, accepting both the boots and the rainponcho. “Perhaps not. But the last time I saw you on television you were being carried out of the White House unconscious, so you’ll forgive me if I allow for the possibility.”

Tony grinned, because that inflection right there? That dry, drawling, insidiously polite snark? JARVIS was probably taking notes. Martin could do it too, once Tony had got him to relax and stop worrying about stuff that didn’t matter. (Usually after an orgasm or two, and no, Tony was not going to start thinking about sex right now, even if it was more fun to think about than the stuff he ought to be thinking about.) 

“Even if I were about to fold,” he told the paramedic. “Once I’m in the suit you’d never be able to tell if I did.” 

“I would,” Thor interjected. “But I’d catch you.”

Tony flipped him off and stood to face the armor. “Okay, J, open up. It’s Showtime.”


	83. Chapter 83

Colonel Jasper Carruthers (RAF, retired) had investigated many a peculiar incident since being taken on by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. He was no stranger to disaster. Not even to superpowered disaster, thanks to the results of occasional Latverian impertinence concerning British airspace. He wasn’t even a stranger to Fitton Airfield, although to be fair the incidents that had brought him here before had been mere nuisances by comparison, however sticky, and Carolyn’s latest hire had managed to prevent any of the paperwork from vanishing under mysterious circumstances. Or drowning in marina sauce. (Or melting. Jasper had repressed that memory, and he truly wasn’t happy to have it rattling a distraction in the back of his mind once more.) 

Yes, Jasper was an experienced investigator. He knew better than to allow anything to lessen his objectivity during an investigation. And yet, he found himself rather hoping that Tony Stark’s genius had not deserted him. Captain Crieff wrote post-incidents reports filled with the kind of specific detail that saved an overworked inspector the trouble of driving all the way from Hampshire just to ask a few clarifying questions. It would be a discredit to the gods of meticulous bureaucracy were a man like that to be found wanting in a crisis.

So yes, Jasper wanted to know what had happened. But he was an experienced inspector, so he was damned if he was going to allow himself to reconstruct the incident by considering anything but the evidence in front of him.

He did not take a deep breath. No need for dramatics. He looked to see that the cherrypicker’s outriggers had been placed, and made sure that the cameraman and the journalist were entirely within the safe confines of the basket, before nodding to the airfield engineer. “Take us up, please.”


	84. Chapter 84

Tony loved the suit. He had forgotten just how much he loved the suit. Well not really, but it was hard not to want to sort of roll around like a puppy in mud with the suit cuddled around him after wandering around in the weather. And he positively adored the HUD; his lovely, informative, heads up display. Eyeballs on the situation were one thing, but to have all the lovely layers of infrared and ultraviolet and the lovely fluttering datapoints that would focus into real information at a glance was way better. When he got back to real life, he’d have to give himself a raise or something, just for thinking up the HUD.

He launched and did a quick climb up to where he could get a decent look at the overall situation before coming down to hover on the opposite side of the debris from the cherrypicker basket that was being maneuvered into place. The explosions and wind had left the forklift upside down on top of the overturned nose of the plane, but the whole thing must have bounced once or twice to smash them together the way they were. The mast was buried into the bottom of the cockpit, the forks were bent, and even from this angle it wasn’t easy to see what was left of the operator’s cage, because pieces of plane were in the way. 

Tony tried not to hover metaphorically too, but it was hard, watching Carruthers tugging at the mess without getting hands on himself. He settled for asking JARVIS if he was getting everything on record. 

“With every possible version of the scan, sir,” JARVIS said, and flipped up the heat signatures to prominence for a moment to prove it. 

Carruthers turned his head, as if overhearing the conversation had given him an idea. “Can you use your hands while you’re in mid-air?” he asked. “Or do you need them to balance?”

“I can use them,” Tony said. “What do you need?”

“Hold this edge, so that the whole mess doesn’t tip over.” Carruthers waited until Tony was in position and then called down to the watching crowd. “I believe this amalgamation is only stable in one direction. You may want to stand back.”

Thor being Thor, he stepped forward. “I shall keep it from causing mischief,” he offered, and found a handhold.

Tony grinned behind his visor. “We’ll try not to drop anything on your head, Sparky,” he said.

“If you do, it would not be the first time,” Thor replied, cheerfully.

“I resemble that remark,” Tony said, in his best Groucho voice. It didn’t work as well without a cigar to waggle, but apparently Carruthers was old enough to get it, because Tony caught the corners of the man’s mouth quirking up. He must be human after all.

Human, and going to cut himself on a ragged edge if he weren’t careful. “Do you want me to pull that part aside?” Tony asked. “Not much gets through these gauntlets.”

“If it can be done without destabilizing the rest, yes,” Carruthers said. He turned his head to the camera guy. “Bring the light, please.”

The television light swamped the sensors for a moment before JARVIS adjusted them. Tony waited until he could see what he was doing again before getting a grip on the piece of metal Carruthers indicated. A smallish tug set the whole mess to wobbling, though, and Tony backed off quickly. “No good,” he said. “I’ll have to cut it away.”

“You can do that?” The newsguy asked.

“Sure,” Tony said, shifting the laser cutter out of its storage compartment. “Better protect your eyes though. Where do you want your hole, Carruthers?”

“Here, I think.” Carruthers indicated the spot and Tony maneuvered around to get a good look at it. Not too bad a problem. It was mostly just the skin of the plane, and JARVIS was already highlighting the weakest points to attack in the HUD. Tony lit up the laser and went to work.

It didn’t take long, the main trick being having to hang onto the chunk of metal as he finished up, because God or not, Thor really didn’t need a chunk of sharp edged aluminum landing on his head. As soon as he had the piece free, Tony carried it away a few yards and set it down by the paramedics. Bah had joined her boss, and she held up fingers crossed for luck for Tony to see. He gave her a wave and a thumbs up before he flew back up to where the action was. It was nice to have people rooting for you.

Carruthers hadn’t wasted any time, and was now lying on his back, with his head and shoulders out of the basket, instructing Warden to move him closer to the gap giving access to the forklift operator’s cage. The cameraman had given up and was holding the camera next to him, clearly frustrated that he couldn’t get an angle on the viewfinder and still be aiming the light where Carruthers wanted it.

The basket tapped the wreckage, which wobbled, and Tony quickly reinforced Thor’s bracing by catching hold of the opposite side. “Are you sure that’s safe?” he asked Carruthers, who, after all, was no spring chicken.

“Not in the least,” Carruthers grunted, without retreating. He was reaching up for something Tony couldn’t see, and the moment he touched it a liquid lump of sodden ashes cascaded down his arm and onto his face. 

“Get him out of there!” Tony ordered. Warden must have had the same idea, because the cherrypicker squealed as it pulled away. But Carruthers was hanging on to something in there, dragging the forklift along and Tony had to use the repulsors to balance on thin air just to keep the whole thing from toppling over. Then whatever it was let go, and the whole mess did topple over, only instead of falling on the de-icing truck it fell on Tony.


	85. Chapter 85

For a moment it was impossible to tell what was happening. The news camera was jittering and more than half blocked by the flailing of arms and legs, and all accompanied by the screeking of gears and the shouts of startled men. As for the feed from the suit, it was a jumble of noise and darkness too, and Steve found himself on his feet, his hand clenching on air instead of the strap of his shield. “Iron Man,” he barked, reaching with the other hand for a communicator that wasn’t there either. “Let me hear your voice!”

A thin cough answered him, and then another, before Tony’s breathless, “I don’t think... you want to hear... what I’ve got to say...” The words were broken apart; Tony had probably got the wind knocked out of him, but the snark was unmistakably coherent. Steve let himself relax as Tony proved his point by chanting obscenities in half a dozen languages..

“There are ladies present,” Steve reminded him. “And you are on international television.”

“Am I? Shit.” There was a soft clunking noise, like Tony had dropped his head against the helmet. “Can you tell if I’m going to get someone’s face if I blast my way out of this mess?”

“Thor’s working on shifting it,” Clint contributed.

“And the paramedics will be right behind him,” Natasha added. 

Steve nodded. The video feed had been too jumbled for him to decipher, but he trusted Clint’s eyes and Natasha’s instincts. “Did you get that, Tony? Don’t break anyone you don’t have to.”

“You don’t let me have any fun,” Tony groused, but they could already hear the clatter and creak of metal being moved around through the suit’s pickups. “Take your time!” Tony called, and he almost sounded okay. 

Steve sat back down.


	86. Chapter 86

Arthur stumbled along after the bed which the orderlies were wheeling through the corridor, still too sleepy to do more than go where he was told. Martin was... something to do with horses... so that meant he could be moved from A&E to the ward. Which was good, probably, except for the having your eyes open to walk part, which Arthur suspected he wasn’t doing very well. But the bed’s wheels were squeaky enough that it might not matter. He couldn’t shut his ears, after all.

It was almost a game, wasn’t it, to think about which noises were what? The pats or slaps of shoes on tile that meant this person was taking their time, and that one was hurrying. The distant splatters of rain on the windows, gentler now that the wind had died down. Soft beeps and chimes and whispers and hums of elevators and monitors and things which Arthur mostly knew from movies. Voices, pitched low, some of them here and now, nurses and patients negotiating the night; some of them the broken bits of sentences that meant someone was flipping through television channels, too tired to do more than push a button on a remote and too sleepless to stop searching for a distraction that would let them dream in peace. Arthur wished he had an apple to give them. Apples were much more soothing than television shows.

The sound blared louder of a sudden, the announcer saying “...and Iron Man is still trapped beneath the debris...” and Arthur could _hear_ Martin jolt awake, his “Tony” cut off by a fit of coughing. 

Arthur opened his eyes, saw the flicker of a television in the room to the right and reached out to grab the orderly’s sleeve. “Wait,” he said. “We need to see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blame Sabrina_Phynn, whose comment last chapter was just too enticing...


	87. Chapter 87

Thor shifted the largest piece of debris and Iron Man popped up into the air, like a particularly enthusiastic Jack in the Box, Mariam thought. He hovered for a moment, various panels in the armour flicking open and shut, as if he were running through some sort of automatic systems check, before coming down to land beside Mariam. “Did anyone get hurt?” he asked, waving casually at the television camera that was watching both of them.

Mariam looked over to the cherrypicker basket where Jack was just finishing up rinsing the ash away from Inspector Carruthers’ eyes and nose, and Jack nodded a reassurance. Nothing to worry about there, then. “Not seriously. You were the only one we needed to rescue.”

He tapped his chest just over the glowing light in the middle. “Titanium armour. I was fine. Could have blasted my way out if it didn’t mean making the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle even smaller than they already are.” The armour clanked as he started to walk over to the cherry picker, but Mariam didn’t see any hesitation or balance problems in the way he moved, so he was probably okay. Which was a relief, because when he’d gone down it had just about given Mariam a heart attack. She’d found herself hoping that at least he’d wind up in the next bed over from Captain Crieff.

Thor joined them. “You are usually faster to dodge, my friend.”

“Not when it means dropping things on you,” Iron Man countered. “Or, you know, other people. Civilians. The kind that are kind of breakable.”

“If you mean me,” Inspector Carruthers said, with a raised eyebrow, “I appreciate the courtesy.” He let Jack help him sit up on the edge of the basket, if only because his hands were filthy and full. “I apologize for allowing my curiosity to get the better of my common sense.”

“Curiosity is good.” Iron Man flipped up his faceplate, revealing Tony Stark’s grin.

“When it doesn’t get you killed,” Jack said, standing up and handing the kit to Mariam. “Or get you a snootful of soot.”

“What was so important anyway?” Mariam asked, and then felt her cheeks heat when everyone looked at her. “I mean,” she said, gesturing at the blackened ring in the inspector’s hand, “that doesn’t look like much of anything.”

“I think,” said Inspector Carruthers, "that it might be a hat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a tip of _my_ hat to pyrzqxgl, who guessed right!


	88. Chapter 88

“The remains of a hat, maybe,” Tony said, and he couldn’t keep the triumph out of his voice, because if it was a hat, even if it was just parts of hat with the cloth burned away, he knew a guy who would never be found on the airstrip without his hat. “Where did you find it?”

“It was blocking access to the safety mechanism,” Carruthers said. “I was trying to see if the forklift was still in gear when it was damaged. I don’t suppose you noticed, while you were underneath there?”

“Sorry.” Tony flipped down the faceplate so he could engage the sensors. “J, take a look at that for the Inspector, would you?” It could be Martin’s hat, judging by what he could see of it. The band part anyway, and maybe a piece of the visor and the framework that held up the cover. Not that there was a cover anymore. And you couldn’t tell anything about the color. “Are we talking hat?”

“Indeed we are, sir.” The HUD lit up with a wireframe that extended out the remnants in Carruther’s hands into the shape of a visored cap. By the “ooh’s” Tony heard from the people nearby, JARVIS was using his low-level laser to make the light-show visible to everyone.

“Did it have gold braid?” Because gold braid would clinch it. For Tony, at least.

“I’m sorry, sir. The decorative elements were burned away.”

“So we don’t know if it was Martin’s hat.” Tony grumbled.

“I would place the circumference of the ring at twenty-one and one half inches, corresponding to a hat size slightly smaller than that which Captain Crieff customarily wears,” JARVIS reported. “However, the curvature of the remaining section of visor indicates that either it or the band has sustained sufficient damage to warp the measurements.”

It was a straw, but Tony was used to grabbing at straws. “Heat damage?”

“Or pressure,” Carruthers interjected. “It was jammed in-between the cage and the seat.”

Tony flipped up the faceplate again and found George Warden’s eyes. “Would that have neutralized the deadman switch?” he asked.

Warden shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d have to try the experiment.”

“Were we looking for this hat?” Inspector Carruthers asked impatiently. “Because if we were, I would have appreciated knowing that before I disturbed it.”

Tony shook his head, remembering that the inspector hadn’t been with them for that part of the discussion. “No. We wanted to know how the forklift got tangled with the landing gear, and whether or not it could have moved the plane into the wind, but I never even thought about a hat.”

Carruthers looked to Warden. “It is a seat-engaged safety then?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Warden said. 

The corner of the inspector’s mouth turned up in a small pleased smile. “From what I could see, the gearshift was in the drive position. With the deadman switch prevented from working, I believe a forklift of that model might easily have prevented the plane from moving forward, and might, I say might, have had sufficient power to propel it backwards. But the hypothesis will require testing.”

“We can test it,” Tony said. He waved at the hat. “We can test that too, for DNA or something, to make sure that it’s Martin’s hat.”

“Well it’s not David’s,” Warden said. “But I thought you said you knew our Martin.”

“I do.”

“Well, then,” Warden reached over Inspector Carruthers shoulder and said, “May I?”

“If you’re careful.” Carruthers handed him the blackened ring and Warden frowned over it.

“Here, give me some light,” he said, and Tony and then camera guy both nudged forward. 

The leather sweatband was blackened, but it hadn’t burned away, and as Tony watched, Warden carefully nudged it away from the inner band, turning it inside out. 

“There,” he said, in a pleased tone, as he got to the back of the hat. “See?”

Tony looked. And wanted to kick himself, because he did know Martin, and if he’d been thinking, he’d’ve known this too. Inside the sweatband, a cloth label had been protected from the worst of the heat. On it, written in neat permanent marker, was the name, “M. Crieff.”


	89. Chapter 89

“Aw, Skip!” Arthur exclaimed. “Your poor hat!” 

But the words barely penetrated the fog of exhaustion that had settled in again once Martin had seen Tony walking and talking and all right. ( _Well, heard him really, and seen something red and gold moving on the screen, before he’d had to close his eyes because the angle he was looking from was distorting everything and making his head spin. But that had been Tony talking, definitely talking, and even if the words didn’t make sense that was all right because Tony didn’t always make sense and Martin could hear that he was all right and that was enough wasn’t it? It had to be enough. At least until Tony came back, it was enough_.)

Arthur said something else and Martin wanted to ask him to be quiet please, because he didn’t know anything about his hat except that it wasn’t on his head. But that would mean letting his mouth open and that would mean coughing. He could probably open his eyes and see what Arthur was on about, but somehow that would probably mean coughing too and he was so tired of coughing. It hurt. 

He made a noise through pursed lips instead and hoped that it sounded like an “I’m listening” noise and not a “please go away Arthur” noise, because he didn’t want Arthur to go away not yet not until Tony could come back and hold his hand. But even making that small noise made him start to cough, and that made Arthur worried and the nurses said things and his bed was moving again, through the corridors to another room and a curtained off space near windows and he could watch the sky, ( _oh god yes, the sky_ ) as it changed slowly from night to dawn.


	90. Chapter 90

“You know him, then, this M. Crieff which they were concerned about?” Meneer Vermeulen asked as they were led to the nurse’s parking lot, and Carolyn permitted herself a small, smug, smile. 

“Indeed. Captain Crieff is one of my -- _our_ \-- best pilots.” She knew perfectly well that he’d probably been gasping “oh god, oh god, oh god,” the whole time he’d been maneuvering that forklift into place and bypassing the safety switch, but seeing as there hadn’t been an eyewitness there was no need to discuss Martin’s little foibles with a potential future customer.

Besides, she was proud of him.


	91. Chapter 91

“Not bad for an amateur,” Clint observed quietly to Natasha, as Bruce and JARVIS played with the revised simulation. The plane and the mudpit where they’d found Martin were alarmingly close together. “I don’t think I’d’ve done that.” 

Natasha considered for two seconds longer than she needed to. “You would have used explosive arrows to cut the wheels out from under the plane,” she decided. “Which would have been equally effective, and kept you a reasonable distance from the larger explosion.”

“In that wind?” Clint shrugged. “Maybe. But I get _paid_ to be too close to things that go boom.”


	92. Chapter 92

Jasper Carruthers secured the scorched hatband in an evidence bag. Despite the lingering taste of ash in his mouth, if asked he would have to admit that this had been a gratifying sidelight to his investigation. He so often spent his entire effort on finding out what had gone wrong, and it was a distinct pleasure to spend some energy on finding out what had gone right. 

But it had taken time, and the small quest had somehow swept up most of the personnel on site. They were still drifting along after Thor, who was pacing off the distance to the place where Captain Crieff had been found.

Jasper tucked his prize away inside his coat and moved to catch up with the others. He  
surveyed their faces, noting the shadows beneath eyes, and the lines that had deepened over the course of the night. Shoulders were slumping; hands were fidgeting, or rubbing at muscles taut with strain. They’d reached a tipping point of exhaustion, all of them, rescue personnel and civilians alike, where to continue working would be to invite a cascading series of errors, and possibly more injuries as well. Jasper recognized the signs, even if no one else did.

“When are you expecting your morning shift to arrive?” he asked Jack Timothy, the paramedic crew leader, in a low voice.

“We _are_ the morning shift,” Timothy said, a corner of his mouth quirking up as he shrugged. “And as far as I know the night shift has been out dealing with every other emergency the storm had to offer.”

Jasper nodded. Summoning assistance from an unaffected portion of the country wasn’t a viable option. Even if personnel were available, there was travel time to take into consideration. He caught George Warden’s sleeve. “Are you the senior on site, now?”

The airfield engineer scrubbed at his face with one hand. “Senior awake,” he said. “Karl, our ATC, is taking a nap on a cot in the terminal.”

“Do I need to wake him to get some answers? I’d like to put the rescue and recovery operation on standby for a few hours, but I need to know if you’ve accounted for everyone.”

Warden nodded toward Iron Man, who was braced in an odd posture that made Jasper feel as if the armor was holding up the man inside. “Ask him. If anyone has the numbers his computer will.”


	93. Chapter 93

Tony was still talking. This in itself was not unusual, and normally Steve would have had no qualms about interrupting, but seeing that Tony was actually making a useful contribution to the conversation with Inspector Carruthers and the others about the recovery effort in Fitton, sidetracking him wouldn’t benefit anyone. Steve could wait for an opening. Sooner or later, even Tony Stark needed a chance to breathe.

He glanced at the Starkpad on his knee to make sure that the new food order was correct with only a tiny twinge of residual embarrassment that Giorgio had put the “Captain America Special” onto the online menu. He liked anchovies with banana peppers and pineapple on his pizza and no one expected him to share anyway, not with the serum burning every calorie he could consume. Pepper and Bruce had opted for salads this time, although Clint, who was a pepperoni purist when he wasn’t snagging pieces from other people’s boxes, had gone for his usual. Natasha, ever the iconoclast, had ordered dessert. Baklava, actually, which sounded good. Steve added another portion for himself. The list still looked short, though, and Steve was distracted enough that it took a moment to realize that it was because it lacked Thor’s “everything but the little fishes” monstrosity and Tony’s side order of the hottest wings Manhattan had to offer. 

Oh, good, Tony had stopped to let Mr. Warden talk. Steve tapped the “submit” button, and set the pad aside before reaching up to activate the earbug he’d retrieved from the uniform in his room the moment Tony had emerged from under the pile of wreckage unharmed. “Iron Man,” he said, on the Avengers’ private channel. “Pass your communicator over to Thor. Jane wants to talk to him.” It wasn’t a lie. Jane did want to talk to Thor. But Steve meant to talk to him first.

Tony didn’t acknowledge the order, but in the background of the newscast where the reporter was explaining what had already been explained to the camera Steve could see the helmet of the suit folding back and Tony passing off the message and the earbud to Thor. And Thor, thank goodness, appeared to have remembered the last catastrophic occasion when half of his conversation with Jane had been picked up on a reporter’s microphone, because he was firing up Mjölnir.

Steve waited, and sure enough not a minute later he could hear the clank of Thor’s boots on a tin roof. He tapped his comm. “You on the hangar roof, Thor?”

“Indeed, Captain. Is my Lady there?”

“I’ll get her on the line for you in just a minute. First I wanted to see how you and Tony are holding up.”

“We are unharmed, but weary.” Thor was definitely quieter than usual. “But I do not believe it will be possible to depart just yet. Not for anything less than a crisis.”

“No crisis,” Steve promised. “I’m just wondering if Tony’s having any lingering problems from that magic blast Loki hit him with. He wasn’t really himself when we were dealing with the jellyfish things, and the last three times Pepper’s asked him how he’s doing he’s just said he’s ‘fine’.” Steve knew ‘fine’, and with his team it only had a fifty-fifty chance of not requiring medical attention.

Thor took a moment to consider. “I believe he has a headache,” he said. “But I would hesitate to ascribe it to the injury he took at the White House. I sense no trace of magic upon him now.”

“Tell your paramedic friend about it,” Steve suggested. “The pretty one. He’d probably take an aspirin from her.”

Thor chuckled. “An excellent strategy, my friend. And should I encourage him to seek his rest?”

Steve shook his head, even though he knew perfectly well that Thor couldn’t see him. “No, not just yet. From what I can tell there’s a good two hours worth of work to get the airfield buttoned up, and they don’t have a lot of people who can run wires the way he can. But tell him Pepper’s arranged for rooms for each of you just down the road from the hospital in Coventry.” Steve checked his notes, “It’s the Grand Victorian Hotel, and JARVIS has it on the GPS. They’re expecting you for breakfast.” 

“We shall do our best to be prompt,” Thor said, with feeling.

Steve grinned, and started dialing Jane. “Oh, and tell Tony to put on some goshdarn shoes before he goes to see Martin at the hospital.” Steve knew how long it took to build up barefoot calluses and it made him remember a thousand stubbed toes watching Tony walk around unprotected. “Remind him that he’s got a suitcase full of clothes on Martin’s plane. I put it on the pallet myself.”


	94. Chapter 94

Wendy Crieff had never been one to raise a fuss. It simply wasn’t worth it, most of the time. A person could get by without being a nuisance to others. But when she’d got the news, there was no question what she must do. She was still her children’s mother, after all. It was just a matter of how to go about it. Thank goodness that nice lady from America had insisted that she accept a ride from Wokingham to Coventry, where her son lay injured in hospital. 

Her second son that was. Simon, her eldest, had never been one to damage himself. Whereas Martin had acquired sprains and bumps and bruises without trying. Martin wasn’t one to fuss either. He might fall, but he’d get back up again and carry on. She’d told the driver so. A nice lad, he was, and very kind about letting her ride up in the front with him instead of in the back where she couldn’t help him watch out for fallen tree limbs and electrical wires. His name was Geedi, which meant ‘traveler’, and his mother still lived in Somalia where she could take care of his grandmother. He missed eating her chicken suqaar and playing football with his brothers, but he liked living in London, and he had a girlfriend who liked to drive across the country to see Morris dancers at pubs in tiny villages where they would sit and sing afterwards. 

And Wendy had curled up on the broad leather seat, listening to him sing old folksongs from Gloucestershire in his soft accent while she watched the wet roads slip away beneath their wheels. She leaned against the shoulder belt for the feeling of safety, her fingers slipping over the smooth glass of the Starkpad which had been waiting for her, (a gift from Miss Potts, Geedi said.) It lit up, every so often, with news that had travelled twice across the Atlantic to reach them. Notes from a Dr. Robinson, and a nurse with JB as initials, entries in Martin’s medical records, annotated by someone who’d taken the time to translate the numbers into ‘good’, or ‘bad’, or ‘improving’ for her sake. Video feeds and news reports she left muted, unable to spare enough concentration to consider how her Martin had come to rub elbows with unexpected superheroes and rich Americans. 

She wished she had Simon or Caitlin with her, and then tucked the wish away, because they were needed to do their jobs back in Wokingham. They had to be, with all the damage the storm had wrought. Twice Geedi had had to backtrack because of accidents others hadn’t avoided, and once because of flooding, when the side road Wendy had suggested dipped too near a rushing river. And the roads got worse as they neared Coventry, between odd, wind-driven bits and pieces and the peculiar feeling of driving through towns as dark as the remotest bit of countryside. Geedi had stopped to check street signs with a torch more than once. But it was brightening now, and Wendy wasn’t sure whether to relax or stiffen her spine as the journey’s end loomed before her. 

A turn past a darkened row of shops and a complex of brightly lit buildings loomed suddenly before them. Geedi brought her up the long drive to the hospital door, and then got out to open her door. “Shall I come in with you, missus?” he asked, holding out a hand.

 _I shouldn’t be a bother_ , Wendy thought, but she reached for that hand. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes. And thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ....and this chapter did exactly none of the things I expected it to. Jenny and Will Robinson will have to settle for being mentioned. Which is probably easier than having a discussion with Wendy come to think of it....


	95. Chapter 95

Natasha Romanov was beginning to be tired. She had no plans to mention it, of course. But it was nearly midnight and she had been up since five, and somehow it was far more tiresome to wait for distant news than to be where the problem was, making a personal difference. She cast her eye around the room, assessing her comrades. 

Cap would be all right. Give him a steady supply of food and coffee and a problem to coordinate and the super soldier serum would keep him awake and alert long past the point where mere mortals would be slumping to the floor. 

Pepper, in the wake of a truly heroic caffeine intake, was beginning to blur around the edges. Natasha wasn’t worried though, because of all of them, Pepper was the most used to partying half the night. Or at least, watching Tony party half the night. 

Clint was tired, and about as ready to admit it as she was. He'd taken up a perch on the back of the couch, angling himself to land on cushions if he overbalanced. (He never had, as far as she knew, at least not unintentionally, but she didn't put it past him to stage a dramatic exit for the night.) He’d perk up for food, but he’d be better off getting some sleep, and he probably knew it.

Bruce had extricated himself from the hologram and was standing next to the bar, talking to a projected image that JARVIS had hovering at just the wrong angle for Natasha to see who was on the other end of the conversation. His posture was normal, and his expression calm, but his hair was more of a mess than usual, scattered by the fingers he’d been running through it. And his eyes were tired. Natasha drifted closer, the better to hear what was up.

“I’m not sure it would be necessary, Colonel Rhodes,” Bruce was saying.

Natasha turned the corner and saw that the screen was split into two parts. One showed James Rhodes, whom all the Avengers knew as Rhodey, but the other showed an unfamiliar Air Force officer, which explained Bruce’s formality.

“We could line up all the ducks and make the offer.” Insignia and nameplate identified the speaker as the same Major Bannerman who had helped with the initial response. “It’s good practice even if the RAF says they don’t need the help.”

“You’re just curious, George,” Rhodey accused, with a grin for the allusion. 

“Ha, ha, sir.” Bannerman had clearly heard the joke so often it had lost the power to annoy, and he grinned right back. “Let’s just say I like to know the job got finished.

“I’d like to head over there myself,” Rhodey said. “Bruce, will you all be going over?”

Bruce shook his head. “I doubt it. One or two of us might, but the Big Guy is better at smashing than rebuilding.”

“I might go,” Natasha said, slipping into the conversation easily. “I’m curious, too.”


	96. Chapter 96

Henry Irving had had a long night. Once his arm had been sewn up, he’d found himself recruited by the paramedic teams out of Coventry Hospital. Not to go out on rescues, just to cover for the nurse who usually ran the supply cupboard so that she could spend her time on the ward instead. 

He’d been relieved when someone had turned up to take his place, but it didn’t solve his problems. His stitches ached and his eyes didn’t want to stay open. But he didn’t live in Coventry, he lived in Fitton, and he wanted to go home. It had taken an hour before he’d managed to hitch a ride in a police vehicle heading in the right direction. Now, three rides later, he’d finally reached Fitton airfield. Or at least, the front gate.

“Thanks,” he told the guy from the electric company who provided his most recent ride

“No problem. They wanted me to check the damage here, anyway.” 

Henry nodded. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but at least he could lead him to the command centre. He pulled on his jacket (or what was left of it.) “I expect they’ll be glad to see you.”


	97. Chapter 97

Tony was explaining that the standard "don't touch the downed wires" safety briefing didn't exactly apply to Thunder Gods who could play skip-rope with lightning when they were in full battle array. Well, he was explaining it (or maybe complaining about it) to the guy from the electric company -- whose name might actually be "Guy”-from-the-electric-company (Tony had been in the suit trying to resurrect a utility pole and not exactly paying attention to introductions) -- and getting interrupted by Bah and the other paramedic, the one who’d been hurt (Henry, his name was Henry Something and he was so very much on the list of people Tony owed a beer and maybe a car for rescuing Martin) chiming in with a story about watching Thor take a couple of bolts in his stride. Well, Bah, was talking, and Henry was getting over the "Ohmygodthat'sIronMan" stare and nodding agreement. And Tony was pretty sure that he was way too tired for the conversation.

"But how can he tell which wires are live?" Guy-from-the-electric-company asked plaintively, gesturing at Thor, who was up in a tree, disentangling the lines that had snapped when the transformer got fried and sorting out which ones still had juice.

Tony shrugged, not that anybody could tell from outside the armor. "I never asked. Maybe he licks the ends." It worked with old batteries, why not power lines?

"It's still not sa..." The protest ended mid-word, and Tony realized that everybody had started staring at the helmet he had tucked under his arm. "Is it supposed to blink like that?"

"Friend Tony!" Thor bellowed from his perch. "Lady Pepper wishes to speak with thee!"

Tony checked and sure enough JARVIS _was_ signalling him to put the helmet back on, probably because Thor still had the earbug, and how Tony had missed _that_ he was going to put down to having the early morning sun in his eyes and not the whole wanting to have a nice drink and a lie-down thing. He nodded acknowledgement to Thor, and wagged a finger at Bah. "Don’t wreck the rescue truck on your way home," because she was going off shift and taking Henry Whatsit with her back to their base or headquarters or station or whatever it was to replenish the supplies and turn it over to the next shift and had only hauled Henry over to meet Tony. (Guy-from-the-electric-company was a bonus feature.) And Tony had thanked him and shaken his hand and now he did it again, and hers too, because he was in the suit and it would have been weird to give her a hug (even if she was a pretty girl who had just managed to save Martin’s life and reputation, and that deserved a hug.) Not that shaking her hand wasn’t weird because Tony usually avoided that, except when he had to for you know, like good PR or wanting a favor and he’d shaken more hands in the past 24 hours (had it been 24 hours yet?) than he usually did in six months, and she told him to let her know how Martin did and he promised and they headed for their truck and he tried to remember what he’d been doing before he got interrupted.

A flash of light from the vicinity of his armpit caught his attention. Blinky eyeholes. Right. Helmet. He put it on and popped up a couple of hundred feet for the sake of discretion. Or just not being on the ground where people could bug him. He watched as Bah maneuvered the truck around and headed for the road, relieved when she figured out the turning distance, because that was a lot of machine to entrust to a newbie, but she seemed to be a pretty good driver. Which reminded him. "Hey J, find out where to send cars or whatever it is that Pepper sends whenever I’m too loopy to skip out on getting checked over by people who aren't Bruce.

Pepper’s face flickered into life in the HUD. “I send fruit baskets, Tony, because there are rules about what kinds of gifts people are allowed to accept. And it’s already taken care of. But I need you to run through the pictures for Tom Young so he can make his deadline.”

Tony grimaced. “Aw, come on, Pep. You know you’re better at that stuff than I am. And you’re gonna wanna know what’s going to hit the papers.”

“That’s what you said two hours ago,” Pepper said patiently. “And I’ve gone through and narrowed it down to the pictures I think won’t send our stock prices into a tailspin, and written up a paragraph on how you met Martin, but Tom needs your approval on the final selection.”

“Technically,” said Young, who was apparently listening in, “it’s my editor who needs the okay. Especially since she’s not entirely comfortable whether Mr. Crieff’s in any condition to understand what I was asking him for.”

“Oh, our Martin won’t mind being in the paper,” a new voice chimed in, and Tony found himself wishing he had the earbug, because the way things echoed around the helmet when so many people were talking made him want to twist around and look behind him for the speaker. “He was terribly pleased when he was included in that article about his Air Cadet Squadron.” It was a woman’s voice, British, and probably more Carolyn’s generation than Martin’s. “But I wish this time there were some photos where he didn’t look quite so unhappy. He’s so dreadfully pale in all of these.”

“Mrs. Crieff?” Tony guessed.

“Yes? Is that Mr. Stark?” He couldn’t see her, and he’d never seen a picture, but he found himself imagining the way she cocked her head a little to the left as she asked the question, the way Martin did when he was trying to figure something out and wasn’t entirely sure of his ground.

“Tony. I’m Tony,” he reassured her, dredging up some of his infamous charm. He was pretty sure that being boyfriends with someone meant you had to try to at least try to get along with their mom. “And I think we’ve gotta cut Martin some slack; it’s not easy to look happy when you’ve just had a plane land on top of you.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” came the response. “But I could run home and find something from our photo album. I’ve plenty of pictures from when he was small.”

Tony really wanted to see that photo album, but he figured if it had the kind of pictures Rhodey’s parents had kept of Rhodey’s giddy youth, Martin would die of embarrassment for any of them to actually hit print. And it would take too much time. But that was why he was a genius, because he had a better idea. “JARVIS, pull up the pictures with me and Martin and send them to Pepper’s tablet. The ones Tom sent me.”

“Of course, sir. Shall I also send copies to Mrs Crieff and Mr Young?”

“There should be one where Mr. Crieff has turned his head slightly to the right and Mr. Stark is looking at him,” Tom Young interjected. “Send us that one.”

It appeared in the HUD as well, and Tony bit his lip, because it was an amazing shot of Martin watching as the Red Arrows flashed past overhead, but it was also the picture with the schmoopiest expression imaginable on Tony’s face. Which might be a good thing, really, since the whole point of publishing pictures was to let the world know how Tony felt about Martin. And Martin looked so damn happy and relaxed there in the curl of Tony’s arms with his lips just a little parted and his eyes shining and his freckles and hair both burnished by the sun.

“Yeah,” Tony said, and then had to clear his throat and say it again. “Yeah, that one. That’s a good one. Is that one okay, Mrs. Crieff?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. That’s... He looks very... very pleased, doesn’t he?” Tony could hear the hesitation in her voice and wondered if she’d had any clue that her son swung both ways, and it took everything he had to not say something stupid.

“It’s the best shot in the bunch,” Young said, saving Tony the need to speak. “The light was just right.”

“It’s very flattering,” Pepper said, and Tony could see her, so he could see the small curl of her lips that told him that she knew exactly how sappy the picture made him look, and was going to let it fly anyway. “I approve. And Tony, here are the others.”

He barely looked at them before saying, “Okay, okay, go with those. I like those. Tom?”

“Yes, Mr. Stark?”

“Is Martin with you? Can I talk to him?” Because if Tony couldn’t be there at least they could talk on the phone.

“I think he’s fallen asleep,” Tom Young said. “We’re out in the corridor, but I can see him from here and his eyes are closed. But I can try him if you like.”

“No,” Tony said, even though he didn’t want to. Martin would need all the rest he could get. “Is he breathing better than he was last night?” Because if he couldn’t talk to Martin, at least he could get a report that wasn’t third or fourth hand.

“He isn’t coughing as much, and the nurse said...” And Tony listened while Tom talked and Martin’s mom added details now and then. Below him, he could see the airfield, and the damage, the reality of the fires and explosions somehow made artificial by daylight and distance, like someone had dressed a set for a movie. There were people in cars and trucks arriving, bringing help and expertise and all the things that would make him and Thor superfluous superheroes. Carolyn would turn up with the key to Gertie so he could get his suitcase and change into something that didn’t itch. He’d be able to go and see Martin. Maybe even get some sleep. It would be over soon.

Soon. But not yet.

Time to get back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has taken so long, but between travelling and cons and getting asked to write stuff for publication (?!) I've been a little scattered.


	98. Chapter 98

“Sure thing, Boss.” Happy Hogan ended the call and tucked his phone into his pocket, already in motion. He was still thirty feet away when the penthouse elevator door slid open, revealing the kid from the pizza shop, who was clutching a handful of hundreds and looking overwhelmed. Happy lifted a hand. “Hold the door, please!”

“What? Oh! Sure!” The kid put himself in the way of the doors and started jamming the money into his jeans pocket. “Um,” he said when Happy got closer. “You may want to wait for a minute or two.”

Happy raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“They were having a... er... ‘spirited discussion’ with some guy called Fury when Hawkeye shoved me into the elevator,” the kid admitted. Then the corner of his mouth turned up. “Is it always like that?”

“Like what?” Happy couldn’t resist asking.

“Holograms everywhere and superheroes eating pizza?” If it was, it was clear, the kid didn’t mind. He even sounded hopeful.

“Pretty much.” Happy admitted. “But it doesn’t always go on this late. So don’t expect tips like that every week.”

“Oh that’s all right,” the kid said, as they did the little do-si-do of Happy getting onto the elevator and the kid bouncing off it and doing a little half-spin to keep talking. “It’s just that I’ve got an interview with Miss Potts on Friday.” 

“ _ **Ms.**_ Potts,” Happy growled as the doors slid shut. He settled into parade rest as the elevator began to rise and scowled at his reflection on the mirrored wall. He felt a little bad for snapping when the kid was clearly over the moon, but it was kind of a sore point, Pepper’s name, which would be Mrs. Hogan if Happy ever got up the nerve to ask and if she said yes and... well, truth to tell he couldn’t imagine her changing her name either way, except maybe in private. So mostly it was just that he’d started thinking about asking again, thanks to the kid pointing out that Pepper was still technically single. 

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He had nearly asked three times. The first, during the frantic months when it seemed like Tony Stark was gone forever and they’d found solace in each other’s arms. The second during the nearly as frantic months after he’d been found, when it had taken both of them to get the erratic genius to consider eating or sleeping. And the third in the miserable months after Obadiah Stane’s perfidy had been revealed, when it seemed like Tony’s sanity was crumbling under the weight of being Iron Man and the head of Stark Industries and it was all that Pepper and Happy could do just to keep everything from falling into ash. Tony’d been dying of palladium poisoning, Happy knew now, which made it easier to forgive the man for dropping Pepper into the position of CEO two days before the romantic dinner date that Happy had been planning for weeks. But the distance between CEO and Head of Security was a lot further than the distance between PA and chauffeur/bodyguard; so The Ring was still locked in the glove box of Happy’s car. And it would stay there, even though once he’d recovered Tony had finally twigged to what was going on under his nose and started playing cupid. At least for now, it could stay there.

Because y’know? What Happy and Pepper had now was plenty good enough to be going on with.

He felt the elevator decelerating and opened his eyes as it stopped and the doors opened. The big holo near the windows was full of Nick Fury’s face and the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. did not look like a happy camper. Cap was making soothing noises: something about Reed Richards just down the street, and with most of the Cabal in custody maybe it was a good time for the Avengers to take vacations. Barton’s mouth was full, but he waved a slice of pizza in agreement while Romanov and Banner cheered the notion.

Happy scooted around the edges of the room until he could get to Pepper. He leaned down over the back of the couch and gave the cheek she offered a peck. “The boss called me,” he told her, _sotto voce_. “Said you looked tired and I should make you get some sleep.”

“No he didn’t,” Pepper said, with a grin. “He told you to take me to bed.”

He felt his ears redden, “Well, yes, but he mentioned sleep too.”

She laughed. “Just give me five minutes.”

He made a show of looking at his watch. “Five minutes,” he agreed, though they both knew it would be ten. He could wait.

He would always wait for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this chapter gave me hairballs. Apologies if I haven't caught all the tense changes, just let me know in comments.
> 
> One of the givens following from the stories flawedamythyst posted is that Pepper and Tony were never together. But I thought she deserved to be happy. Or deserved Happy, as the case might be. And that meant he needed a chapter...


	99. Chapter 99

Douglas Richardson lay very still, waiting for the top of his head to fall off. He’d thought that he’d consigned mornings like this to his past, and was remotely disappointed that he couldn’t remember what he’d done to deserve another one. But gradually the throbbing of his own heartbeat against his eardrums diminished to the point where he could hear the familiar cadences of unrealistically cheerful people attempting to convey news reports to the uncaffeinated masses. The sun was probably up then, not that he wanted to see it. He fumbled for his pillow, hoping that an additional layer of padding might muffle the specifics sufficiently to allow him to fall back to sleep before his bladder decided to join forces with the overenthusiastic elephants which were evidently gamboling around the room in the hopes of making him rejoin the living.

A particularly malignant clattering penetrated both foam and fog. Douglas bit back a whimper. “Arthur,” he whispered, plaintively. “Go away.”

The appeal fell on deaf ears. The clattering continued, along with the squeaking of a misaligned trolley wheel, and the news presenters went on yattering about something... the weather, Douglas thought reluctantly, when his ears latched on to a word here and there despite his best efforts. There were other voices murmuring, and the smell of badly brewed coffee. Dear lord, had Carolyn put them up in some wretched hovel boasting the thinnest walls in the country?

He twisted onto his other side, and for a moment the pillow fell away from his head, allowing the cheerful voice from the television the chance to gain volume. “And for our next story this morning we have a report from the disaster at Fitton.” 

Douglas’s eyes flew open as memories slammed into place. 

He was in a ward. A hospital ward. He had a concussion, not a hangover (thank heaven for small mercies) because he’d been struck in the head by the nozzle of a runaway fire hose. Carolyn was safe and unharmed: she was gone now, but she’d been here, late into the night. Arthur had been uninjured too, the last Douglas had seen of him. And Martin... Douglas dredged through his memories, sorting reality from nightmare. Martin had been hurt, and badly. Found in a ditch and taken to Coventry, Carolyn had said, with a broken leg. She’d been getting reports second or third hand via New York and the Avengers.

The curtains to either side of his bed blocked his view of the television, and he really, truly, did not want to try to get up and move them, but he could hear the voices rattling on.

“...airlines have been doing their best to notify friends and family as each of the dead and injured are identified, but the uncertain weather conditions are only just now allowing representatives to reach the stricken airfield itself. Andrew, you’ve been there throughout the night. Can you give us an update?”

“Well, Louise, with the benefit of daylight it’s becoming possible to begin to sort out the storm damage from the damage done by the crash of that Essex Charters flight and understand just how much worse things might have been. Standing where I am, if we turn the camera 180 degrees you can see the demarcation. And here’s an aerial view, courtesy of Iron Man. The Essex flight broke apart as it crashed, with bits of it doing damage to the airfield electrical system and striking the airfield firetruck, pinning the crew inside. Also some parts of it struck an Air Quebec Express flight which was still in the process of being unloaded here. The explosion of that aeroplane set off a LingonAir flight beside it, which appears to have set fire to a NAIRobi Charter flight. You can see the progression, and how, if it had continued, there might easily have been a chain reaction of explosions reaching all the way down to the terminal, where as many as 500 stranded passengers and flight crew were waiting for transportation to area hotels. That didn’t happen, thanks to the actions of a local pilot: Captain Martin Crieff, of MJN Air.”

Oh, to hell with the headache. Douglas had to _see_ this.


	100. Chapter 100

“Spitfire. Hey, Spitfire. You with me?”

Martin made a noise and set about the beginning-to-be all too familiar process of dragging himself up through the cotton wool of drugs and pain and exhaustion. He managed to only cough a little this time, which counted as an achievement, but it still took a ridiculous amount of effort to open his eyes.

It was easy to smile, though, given what he saw. The Iron Man armour always did look a bit smile-worthy with Tony’s head sticking up out of it because he’d taken the helmet off (and Tony’s head was always worth looking at, even when his hair was plastered down because it had been in the helmet too long.) Although, come to think of it, Tony’s smile was a little uncertain and there were too many lines on his forehead and his complexion was kind of gray, although that might be dirt, but all the same... “Tony,” Martin croaked, and tightened his fingers on the hand that was holding his. “Are you all right?”

It might have been the wrong thing to say, given which one of them was in a hospital bed, but it was definitely the right thing to say because Tony’s smile widened into a proper grin. “I’m hungry and tired and I want coffee that tastes like coffee, but other than that I’m good,” he said. “Pepper’s got me and Thor a hotel just down the road and I’m gonna head that way and get some breakfast in a minute, but I wanted to see you first. Did you see the news? Your mom thought you were mostly awake.”

“I think so,” Martin said. “I’m not sure how much of it was real though.” There’d been a lot of talking, and pictures of trees down and floods everywhere, which was only to be expected after the storm. And hadn’t Tony been on there, talking to one of the local reporters? “Did you tell everyone we’re boyfriends?”

“Yup.” Tony might have shrugged inside the armour. It was hard to tell. “I had to do something nice for the guys who were letting me tap into the television feeds all the way here. Don’t worry about it, though. The kid who drove your mom up from Whatsingham is sitting outside the door and he won’t let anyone hassle you. And Pepp’s going to send up a PR minion from London to handle the fall out. I woulda asked you first, but you were kinda out of it, and I was kinda in a rush and...” 

“Tony,” Martin said, to stop the flow of words. He needed shorter sentences right now. “It’s okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Because it was okay. Nobody would make Tony go away if everyone knew they were boyfriends. Martin closed his eyes and luxuriated in the soft sweep of Tony’s thumb across the back of his hand. “At least you told Mum first.”

“You would have told her if you’d had the chance,” Tony replied softly. 

Martin wasn’t sure about that. He hadn’t even told his mum he was dating anyone, much less one of the most famous people in the world. “I don’t think she would have believed me.” He wasn’t sure he’d believed it himself, after all, and it was a lot easier not to have to explain why something had gone wrong in his life if his mother never knew it had gone right for a while. He frowned, wondering why she hadn’t interrupted yet, and opened his eyes again. “Where did she go?”

Tony wrinkled his nose adorably. “She’s making Arthur eat some breakfast. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s hard to tell.”

Martin considered the possibility of breakfast, but he really didn’t want anything right now. Except maybe something to drink. His throat was sore.

“Here.” Tony reclaimed his hand in order to reach for the glass of water on the nightstand and adjusted the straw to make it easier for Martin to drink. 

“Did I say that out loud?” Martin asked. 

“Mm-hmm,” Tony agreed. “Pain meds’ll do that.” He waited until Martin had managed a few sips. “Do you remember anything else from the news?” he asked a little too casually.

Martin didn’t shake his head, because that would make his ear hurt, but it was a close call. “No,” he admitted, knowing that his face was pinking up. “I...er... I started daydreaming.”

“Aw, no fair,” Tony groaned, leaning in to kiss the tip of Martin’s nose. “You know your blushes make me horny. At least tell me you were daydreaming about me.”

Martin smiled apologetically. “Sorry. It was just something silly.” He wished his eyes would stay open. His eyelids kept obstructing the view.

“Silly?” Tony coaxed. His fingers were cool as they brushed across Martin’s cheek and rested a moment on his forehead.

“You know. Heroic Pilot Saves the Day. Silly.” Although having his eyes closed did mean he didn’t have to look at whatever expression was on Tony’s face now that the words had slipped out. “Childish.” He swallowed back the wanting for the dream to have been true. “All I managed to do was get hurt.” He waited for Tony to go away, for the comfort of his presence to vanish, but it didn’t. Instead he could hear the creaks and clanks of the armour as Tony did something nearby. Then more little comforting touches came, adjusting his pillows, straightening the hospital gown. Perhaps this was another dream.

“I think you managed more than that,” Tony said, as he fingercombed Martin’s hair back from his forehead. “You still don’t remember?”

“I can’t tell.” Martin sighed. “Arthur tried to explain, but...” He grimaced and pried one eye open again. “He said he couldn’t talk about the scary parts yet. And my dreams don’t make any more sense than Arthur does.”

“Toldja so,” Tony said, glancing to the side, and Martin opened his other eye and tried to lift his head a little to see who Tony was talking to. All he could see was the Iron Man helmet, sitting on the bed table. Its eyes were glowing, and one of them flickered dark for a moment.

“Did your helmet just wink at me?” Martin asked, diverted from the question he’d meant to ask about who Tony was talking to.

“Wink?” Tony echoed, reaching for the helmet.

“A minor power fluctuation, sir,” it said in JARVIS’s voice. “If you would be so kind as to adjust the cable?”

“Hang on.” Tony picked up the helmet and did something. Now that Martin was looking, he could see a wire strung from a port near the arc reactor over to the helmet, like some kind of strange extension cord. As Tony fiddled with it, the eyelights flickered again before brightening.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I couldn’t,” Tony grunted. “This is just... ah... just temporary. J, remind me to either put in a decent connector or move the sensors out of the helmet so we don’t have to do this again.”

“Of course, sir,” the helmet said as Tony set it carefully back into place. It was looking at Martin again. Deliberately.

This probably called for a few more brain cells. Or waking up properly. Or just asking. That might be easier. “Why is it looking at me?”

“Because I’m not the only person who wants to know how you’re doing,” Tony said. “Wave hi to Steve. He’d answer back, except that I don’t really have the helmet rigged as a cell phone. J can answer because he’s already in there, right J?”

“I can convey any messages that are necessary,” JARVIS said. “Captain Crieff, Captain Rogers is glad to see your condition improved from last night.”

“Is it?” Martin wondered.

“Considerably, sir,” JARVIS replied. Which meant it was probably true, even if Martin still felt like he’d been hit by a truck. 

Tony was still blathering. “I suppose I could jury rig something, only I’m tired of jury rigging things. I’ve been jury rigging things for hours. Hey, Martin, did you know how old the electrical system is at your airfield? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys who put it in knew Cap back in his glory days.”

Martin blinked. “I don’t think he’s ever been to Fitton,” he said. “He didn’t even know where Coventry is.” He was waking up a little, in spite of himself, and he remembered how blank Captain Rogers had looked during that awkward discussion over dinner the first time that he’d stayed at the Avengers’ tower.

Tony sniggered. “I bet he knows now.” He was, Martin realized, hanging on to the bed rail as if it were the only thing keeping him upright. 

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Martin asked.

“I’m just tired, honest,” Tony said. “And itchy. I am so gonna have to clean out the crap I got inside the suit. Did I mention that your electrical system is falling into pieces? Because I’ve got bits of it in awkward places now. Good thing I sent a suitcase with you last night. Or yesterday night. Whenever it was. That’s what took me so long to get here. I had to wait for your boss to come to the airport with the keys so I could get into your cargo hold. I mean, I could have busted in, but I didn’t want to piss her off, and that would definitely have pissed her off. She’s got Belgians in her house, did you know that? At least she said she had to get back to the Belgians at her house. Unless she meant waffles? Do you think it was waffles?”

“Waffles?” Martin echoed, and then tried to concentrate on what was important. Which wasn’t Carolyn’s breakfast. “If you’re tired you should rest.” He tried to say it forcefully, which made him cough, and then Tony wanted to give him more water, which wasn’t what he’d meant to have happen. “Sorry,” he said when he caught his breath again, 

“Just drink something and stop apologizing,” Tony said gruffly, holding the tip of the straw against Martin’s lips. “I know I’m a pain in the ass, but I’ve got some things I want to make sure you know, that’s all. I’ll stop bugging you in a minute.”

“You’re not a pain in the ass,” Martin protested. “You’re always careful and I like it when...” and then he blushed, because the helmet was still there watching and Captain America was listening. He took a sip of water, hoping it would hide how flustered he felt, and belatedly realized that Tony might have meant something less risqué. He reached up to catch the engineer’s hand. “I don’t want you to leave. It’s just... you’re tired. And hospital chairs are awful.”


	101. Chapter 101

Tony wished he wasn’t in the suit. Yeah, it was probably holding him upright, but he couldn’t even get his head down close enough to enjoy the heat of his boyfriend’s blush against his own cheek, and cuddling was right out.

“You spend a lot of time in hospital chairs?” he asked, because he hadn’t thought Martin was accident prone. Dead opposite really, although it would explain the guy’s fascination with safety protocols.

“My dad was sick for months before he died,” Martin explained.

Tony flinched. “Sorry.”

The corners of Martin’s mouth turned down, even though he was trying to smile. “That’s how I know how tiresome it is to be stuck in a hospital, watching someone else be ill. You want to be there, but it hurts and gets boring too.” Martin’s eyes closed. That was a long speech for a guy who had to pause for a sniff of oxygen every fifth word, but it was probably explained by the next words to slip out of Martin’s mouth. “I don’t want you to get bored with me.”

Tony decided that the last bit was the pain meds talking again. He squeezed Martin’s hand but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the words. “Yeah. Hospitals suck,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be here for you.” And then, because he was basically an honest guy, he added, “Some of the time, at least.”

The corners of Martin’s mouth turned up again. “Some of the time is good.”

Tony grinned. “Yeah.” And then he remembered. “Oh, and look.” He went to rummage in the suitcase for a moment and came up with his prize salvage. 

“My phone!” Martin exclaimed, reaching instinctively before the awkwardness of all the tubes and wires attached to his body stopped him. “I never thought I’d see it again. I didn’t break it, did I?”

“Break Stark Tech?” Tony scoffed. “Haven’t you seen the ad where we drop one of these babies from fifth story window? And then have an elephant stand on the same phone?”

“Was it the same one?” Martin took the phone Tony proffered and frowned at it, running a finger over the “glass”. (Transparent aluminum really. Or did they call it aluminium over here? Tony was too tired to remember.) 

“Yup. And look. No cracks or breaks anywhere.” A couple of scratches on the back, and those would buff right out. Tony was pretty proud of his design guys. He might have set the standard, but they’d sure as hell as lived up to it.

“But it’s not working.” Martin said sadly, when he couldn’t get the phone to respond.

“It needs a charge, that’s all.” Tony took back the phone. “I promise you, twenty minutes on the charging cradle and you’ll be good to go. Then you can call me anytime you need to.” He made himself leer, and added with a waggle of eyebrows, “And hey, we can try phone sex!”

Martin flushed and looked down. “That’s about all I’ll be good for,” he mumbled.

Tony couldn’t help grinning as he tipped Martin’s chin back up. “You’ll be surprised by what a guy with a cast on his leg can be good for,” he said, leaning down to steal a quick kiss.

Martin blinked at him. “You’ve had a broken leg?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Tony sighed. “Skiing accident when I was twenty. Some guy with a hundred and fifty pounds on me zigged instead of zagged and bam! Next thing I knew I was lying on a gurney looking up and thinking ‘that’s the ceiling of an ambulance’. Right before thinking ‘I’ve been watching too much television.’”

Martin’s smile blossomed, the shadows lighter this time. “Did you really think that?”

Tony drew an x over the arc reactor. “Cross my heart.” He bent over to kiss Martin’s forehead. “We can manage without sexing it up for a couple of weeks, Spitfire. It’ll be like me having to do superhero stuff and you flying all over the world. We’ll talk on the phone a lot and I’ll tell you about what I’m working on. And when you’re better we can go to more airshows and stuff. You’ll like that, right?” Tony wasn’t certain, all of a sudden, if Martin would like anything to do with planes after nearly being killed by one, He was reassured, though, by the way Martin perked up at the idea.

“We could go to Southport,” he said. “I’ve only gone there once. Or Clacton, because that one’s free. And they’re both over the ocean, so you get a great view.”

The helmet made the noise people write down as “ahem” and Tony remembered why he’d put it there. He didn’t smack himself in the forehead dramatically, but that was because it would worry Martin. “We’ll go to as many as we can,” he promised. Then, because he couldn’t think of a graceful way to get to the point, he blurted out. “I need to find out how much you remember from last night.”

Martin blinked. “I don’t remember anything from last night,” he demurred.

Tony tried to look encouraging. “Of course you do. You just don’t know if the parts you remember are the important ones or not.”

Martin’s shoulders went up toward his ears, and shook his head. “I just remember being stuck in cold water and mud, and even some of that is hazy,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he didn’t want to discuss it. “Anyway, why do you want to know?”

“For the accident investigation.” Tony said. “So we can figure out what happened. Come on, Martin. The sooner we get it over with the sooner you can stop thinking about it.”

“But I don’t remember the crash!” Martin insisted, his eyes beginning to brim with tears..

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. You don’t remember the crash, that’s okay. We’ll just... just....” Tony snapped his fingers. He’d had an idea, and since he was a genius, he knew it was a good. one. “Start further back. Tell me what kinds of planes were in the stack over Fitton while you were waiting for permission to land.”

“What kinds of planes?” Martin echoed. “But they should know that.”

“They do know that. But confirming it doesn’t hurt.” Tony waved at the helmet. “JARVIS’ll take notes. And then we can sort out which parts of your dreams are memories and which parts are nightmares.” He put on his best pleading face. “Come on, Martin. I want to get done so I can go have breakfast.”

Martin took a deep breath. “Okay.”


	102. Chapter 102

Captain Crieff recalled a significant amount (even if his memories were articulated in a non-linear sequence.) JARVIS confirmed each assertion against current data, and added points to the data matrix marked with appropriate confidence levels. Biological memory was susceptible to corruption, particularly in cases of injury, but the Captain’s accuracy concerning concrete detail (types of aircraft, positions, and sequence of landing) was admirably high. Personal actions were prefaced by indicators of doubt (“I think”, “I keep dreaming that”, “I just can’t tell if”, “I don’t know if”, “I should have”) but seldom contradicted the known history of the event.

Satisfactory.


	103. Chapter 103

Martin had a feeling that Tony wanted to find out something specific, but his head was too full of rattles to make sense of the questions Tony was asking. It seemed like every time he got close to something that was frightening, Tony would change the subject to something safe, or easy, like airplane specifications, or the kinds of ground equipment Fitton airfield had to offer and he’d lose the thread again. And the one thing that did make sense of the things Tony was asking didn’t make sense at all because it was impossible. Wasn’t it?

“What are we trying to do?” he asked at last, because the frustration was getting to be as bad as the pain that was trying to push its way past the drugs.

Tony ran a hand into his hair and tugged on it, as if he were trying to keep himself awake. “Sort out the real shit from your dreams, mostly,” he said. “It won’t make the nightmares better, but at least you’ll know which things are totally wrong.”

“You mean like Arthur pushing a trolley all over the field and giving people Cornish pasties while singing choruses from Sweeney Todd?” Martin asked, because he had dreamed that, and it was pretty high on his list of can’t-be-trues.

Tony blinked. “Arthur’s seen Sweeney Todd?”

“No, no, of course not,” Martin said. “But he was talking about meat pies while...” Martin closed his eyes, remembering the taste of the mud and the all-encompassing cold. “while I was stuck. He talked about a lot of things.”

Tony’s hand came down to rest against Martin’s shoulder, stroking softly in small circles. “I heard some of it,” he said. “But the camera wasn’t close enough for me to make out all the words. No singing though. At least no showtunes.”

“So that’s real. Arthur talking is real.”

“Yes.”

Martin kept his eyes closed. Maybe if he started from the beginning he could get through this. “I know I told Douglas to take the landing.”

“You did.”

“And he made a textbook crosswind landing. No mucking about, just getting us down. I’m pretty sure I said so, and Douglas said he was too hungry for flair, and did I want to join him for a steak once we had everything buckled down. He said he’d lend me the money until Carolyn pried my share from underneath her mattress.”

“That sounds like Douglas.”

“So that’s probably true.” Martin swallowed back a cough. “And once we reached our berth, Carolyn came up to the cockpit and said she’d pay for dinner herself if it meant we’d hurry up and get Gertie secure so she could go home.”

“Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like Carolyn.”

“Well, she meant sandwiches at the canteen, not steaks, so it did. But we were all hungry enough to say yes.” He could remember that clearly. The way the mere mention of food was enough to make his stomach protest once his surroundings had stopped pitching and yawing in the wind. “Douglas had to keep the engines going until Arthur and I had the nose tether placed because it was blowing so hard.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t lose your hat,” Tony said, and there was a suspiciously casual note to the way he said it that had Martin open one eye to see why. But Tony only smiled. “Or did the gold braid weigh it down?”

“Not you too,” Martin sighed, although he was confusingly reassured by being teased. “I pulled it down so the visor would keep the rain out of my eyes,” he pointed out. “And it’s a perfectly decent hat. It doesn’t have much more gold braid than Douglas’s does.” He frowned. “Or it didn’t. I... wasn’t there something on the telly about it? Arthur was sad.”

“We found it,” Tony said. “This morning, when we were trying to figure out what happened. Or what was left of it.”

“You were hurt,” Martin remembered. “Weren’t you? Trapped under debris.”

“I wasn’t trapped, just a little inconvenienced. I was in the suit, so I could have blasted my way out, but people were on the other side so...” Martin was pretty sure that Tony shrugged, but it was hard to tell when he was in the suit. “Do you remember when you lost your hat?”

Martin looked away. “No.” Except in the nightmares. “Where did you find it?”

Tony sighed. “In a forklift.”

The helmet made a noise. “Sir,” Jarvis said, clearly disapproving. “The value of Captain Crieff’s testimony will be diminished if you provide him too much data. Colonel Carruthers...”

“I know, I know, I know what he said,” Tony grumbled. “But we’re not getting anywhere, J, and I’m running out of steam.”

Martin barely heard the exchange. “A forklift?” he squeaked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't forgotten the story, honest. I just had a rotten month medically and I'm only getting my brain back now.


	104. Chapter 104

It was easy sometimes to forget that Tony was a genius. Not that he wouldn’t remind you, Steve thought wryly, but when the man wandered through Avengers tower leaving a trail of half-finished coffee cups in his wake, or turned up in the middle of the night babbling about nanotech marshmallow dispensers, “genius” wasn’t exactly the first word to come to mind.

But then you’d watch him turn all of his attention onto a problem and remember.

No one was going to be able to discredit Martin’s testimony on the basis that Tony had led the witness; Tony hadn’t led Martin anywhere except around Robin Hood’s barn. And yet, the desultory conversation had still established that Martin knew the numbers for every airplane that had been in the air over Fitton, and what’s more, the capacities of every piece of ground equipment there. Martin had the emergency services on speed dial; he knew the safety regulations off by heart; he took precautions even when there was rain pouring down the back of his neck. Tony had proved that. Had proven all of that, just by asking innocuous questions whenever Martin had begun to shy away from the one thing that Tony wanted most to prove.

But even a genius can’t dodge forever.

On the feed from the helmet it was hard to tell which one of them was paler. Martin’s freckles were standing out sharply, but Tony’s beard looked like ink splattered on a blank page. and both of them had bruises below their eyes. And the way they kept touching each other. And looking at each other! Steve found himself glad that the others had gone off to get some rest; this felt uncomfortably personal. Intimate. It made the back of his neck hot, like watching the kind of movie or play where everything stands for something else and usually something you couldn’t mention in polite society.

Tony brought the hand that had been on Martin’s shoulder up to his cheek, but he curled his fingers inward, so that only the backs of them were resting below the oxygen tube, still moving, ever so slowly and soothingly in small circles. “C’mon, Martin. Tell me. How did you lose your hat?”

“But it’s impossible,” Martin protested, his voice cracking from word to word. “It can’t be real. It’s just a dream.”

“So tell me the dream.”

There was a long silence, while Tony waited, and Martin gnawed on his lower lip.

“I... There was... it was burning.” Martin he said at last, and when Tony only dipped his chin in the smallest of nods he plowed on. “A plane. The NAIRobi Illyunov. It was burning, Tony. I saw it burning, and I...” Martin licked his lips. “I had a forklift. The new Mackenzie. The pallet shifter. I...” He shook his head and looked away from Tony, tears starting up in his eyes. “I was meant to be rescuing Terry.”

Steve wanted to reach through the image, remind Martin that no one could save everyone, but Tony just took a deeper breath and asked. “So what made the plane the priority?”

It must have been the right question, because Martin reached up to smear the tears away and turned his face back towards Tony. “It was moving. The planes nearest the crash had exploded and its tethers had broken, or burned away, and it was moving and burning and it was going to hit the Global Bombardier from Mandertech. They fly materials for medical and agricultural companies. Oxygen tanks, fertilizer... no way of knowing what they had in their hold. And the Illunov was going to hit their plane next or explode or both and I had the forklift and I...” He shook his head, like a horse trying to dispel a persistent fly. “I didn’t. Did I?”

“Didn’t what?” Tony asked, though Steve could see him biting back more words. “Tell me, Martin. Step by step.”

“I didn’t... I thought I... I couldn’t push it back into the wind. Not enough power, and there were planes burning there too. I... I...” Martin cupped his hand, as if he were picking something up. “I jammed the mast under the nose and used the forks to pick it up, steered it toward the runway.” His eyes, on Tony’s were pleading. “I didn’t know if anyone else would try to land. I had to hope they’d all diverted. That they’d been warned away.”

Tony was shaking, Steve realized, the vibration from his hand on the bed rail making the helmet wobble minutely in its perch. His nod was jerky, and his other hand had pulled away from Martin, as if he were trying to hide the tremors. Steve was pretty sure Martin wouldn’t notice. He was shaking too.

“I was so scared,” he admitted. “Tony, I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do.”

“What did you do?” Tony managed, and Steve knew that note. That was Tony wanting to disappear into a bottle.

“I... I wanted the forklift to keep going. But I didn’t want to be in it.” Martin smeared away new tears with an unsteady hand. “I was sure I would die and I didn’t want to die. I was so scared, Tony.”

“It’s okay,” Tony said, unable to withhold comfort anymore. “It’s okay, Martin. It’s okay.” He tugged up a corner of the sheet to swipe at the tears on Martin’s face, ignoring the ones which were beginning to streak down his own. “You didn’t die. That’s the important thing to remember. You’re here. You’re alive. It’s okay.”

“But I was so afraid,” Martin wailed. “I couldn’t be brave. Not like you.”

“Me?” Tony exclaimed. “Hell, Martin, I built a filtration system into the suit to clean things up when I piss my pants.”

“You what?” Martin squeaked.

“No shit!” Tony said, entirely too brightly, raising one hand as if he were swearing on a witness stand. “I mean, it can’t do shit about shit, but the filter system is pretty good at handling liquids. Recycles them into the cooling system usually, or my “don’t get dehydrated” reserve, but if you see some coffee contrails coming off the suit in a battle sometime, well, now you know why.”

And all the time Tony was babbling, Martin’s jaw was dropping and his eyes were opening so wide he looked like someone out of a Tex Avery cartoon. He was still breathing too hard, but his self-flagellation was completely derailed. “Coffee contrails?” he echoed, and then began to giggle.

Steve leaned back in his chair and hid a smile. Yeah. Genius.


	105. Chapter 105

Laughing was good, Tony thought, until it led to coughing. He fumbled for the cup on the nightstand, barely catching it before the water followed the straw to the floor. "Here," he said, leaning an elbow against the bed control to crank up the head end. "Here, this'll help."

Martin nodded and craned forward, trying to help Tony guide the cup between coughs. Some of the water spilled down his chin, but most of it went where it was meant to, and after several gulps he waved away the cup and lay back, his eyes closed as he let his breathing settle.

Tony made sure he filled the cup again before he put it down, prepositioning a fresh straw where it was less likely to be displaced. That emptied the pitcher, so he went to the bathroom to refill it. By the time he got back Martin eyes were open.

He was looking out the window at the sky, and his smile was crooked, and sad. "Terry's dead, isn't he." he said, and it wasn't a question. The resignation in his voice made Tony want to go fix something, _anything_ , because he couldn't fix this.

"Yeah," he sighed, taking up his place beside the bed. "Yeah, as far as I know." A lie wouldn’t work, no matter how much Tony wished it would. 

"Because I wasn't there." And there was too much acceptance in those quiet words. Too many echoes of all the things Tony knew about himself and the things he had never thought to regret until a cave in Afghanistan. But this was about Martin.

"Because he had a truck land on him." Tony intercepted Martin's gaze, and hoped he looked reassuring. "And you didn't put it there."

"But if I just..."

"No," Tony cut off the words. "No. Not gonna let you take the fall for that , Spitfire. It wasn't your fault. There wasn't time, and you were risking your neck doing something that needed to be done." And nobody could be in two places at once, Tony knew. As hard as the Avengers tried to avoid getting innocent bystanders hurt or killed, they couldn't always manage it, and Tony wanted to tell Martin that, but he was all too conscious of the helmet, and the recording, and the investigation that was going to end up making far too much of what he said here and now public in a way that not even Pepper could spin. Besides... "You'd called for help. The experts were already on their way. If Terry had a chance they were the right people to make sure he got it."

Martin didn't look like he agreed, but he nodded anyway. "I guess. I just wish... I wish I hadn't been so useless."

"I don't call trying to get a burning plane somewhere it can blow up without hurting anyone useless."

Martin bit his lip, watching Tony for a long moment before he finally spoke. "Are you sure it wasn't just a dream?" he asked, and Tony didn’t know if he wanted to hear a yes or a no.

"Almost," Tony said. "Tell me what you did with your hat."

Martin sighed, and sank deeper into the pillow. "I sabotaged the forklift."

Tony could feel his eyebrows trying to escape over the top of his head and it was all he could do not to frown. “Sabotage?” he exclaimed. That wasn’t the word he’d use!

Martin flinched. “I disabled the safety mechanism!” And it was more of a crime than an accomplishment in Martin’s eyes, if his pleading look to Tony meant anything. And Tony wanted to laugh and to cry and to pick Martin up and hug him and hold him until he forgot all about forklifts and safety mechanisms and they could both sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

And he couldn’t. Not yet. “How?” he asked, because they were so close now to the end of the questions, and he didn’t want to start from the beginning again.

Martin fidgeted with the blanket, looking down at his hands. “I prevented the power cutoff from activating by cramming the operator manual down one side of the seat and my hat down the other side. So the forklift would keep moving, even after I got out. And then I got out and ran.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember much after that. Just... just pain.”

Tony had to open his mouth a couple of times before words came out. “We found the hat by the seat,” he told Martin, reaching over to capture one restless hand. 

“So they’re real, then,” Martin said. “The nightmares. They’re real.”

“If I know nightmares, and I do, then they’re probably mostly true. But the worst parts -- those your head adds in.” Tony wasn’t going to elaborate. Martin didn’t need to know. Not now, at least.

Martin didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He shifted position, shifted again, tried to bend up the unbroken leg and then let it fall back with a grimace. “I didn’t do anything about the steering,” he whispered mournfully. “I jumped out and didn’t do anything about the steering. What if the forklift had started going the wrong way?”

“What if you’d stayed in the forklift trying to do something about the steering until the plane blew up?” Tony countered, even though the idea made him want to hurl. “You barely got away as it was.” He smoothed the places where Martin’s hospital gown had twisted up. “I could be standing in a morgue, not by a hospital bed. I’m glad you didn’t do anything about the steering.”

That got through. He could see the tension going out of Martin’s shoulders, just a bit, and the poor guy stopped trying to wriggle out of all the bandages and tubes. His lower lip disappeared between his teeth for a moment, but then he straightened out his mouth and steadied, the way he did when he got over his nerves and settled down to a good round of sex. “I don’t know if it’s my brain adding it, or not, but in the dreams, the nightmares, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair. That it wasn’t fair that I’d decided that it was worth the risk of telling you that I loved you, knowing I might lose you, and then have you lose me instead. That I didn’t want to leave you alone.” Martin raised Tony’s hand with his. “I don’t want to do that to you.”

“But it might happen.” Tony admitted. “I might do it to you.”

Martin nodded, and it was impossible to tell if he was paler because he was already giving the sheets a run for their money. “Yes. But Douglas says that what makes a relationship serious is feelings, not actions. That we should grab for whatever we can get, as long as we can get it.”

Tony squeezed Martin’s hand, even as he laughed. “You hate it when Douglas gives you advice.”

The corner of Martin’s mouth turned up. “Well, sometimes he’s right about experience.” And then the turned up corner turned into a full-fledged smile. “I did let him take the landing.”


	106. Chapter 106

“Sir?” JARVIS spoke up and Tony grimaced an apology before turning his attention to the helmet. Martin didn’t mind. He didn’t have enough energy. Even lying still while the head of the bed was propped up the way it was an effort. And worrying, for once, felt like it just wasn’t worth his time.

He should have known better. Should have known that Tony wouldn’t go away even though he’d confessed to being afraid and taking foolish chances. Should have realized that Tony would forgive him for not saving Terry, even if Martin wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive himself. Should have been able to tell, just by Tony’s presence, that whatever else was broken, what he and Tony shared had somehow come through the night intact. 

He closed his eyes, listening to the comfortable sound of Tony talking to JARVIS without really paying attention to the words. Something about Inspector Carruthers and the operator manual and forensic evidence and paperwork. Poor Tony. He hated paperwork. Martin ought to help with that. Later, maybe. After he'd had a chance to think through all of the ramifications of what he'd done.

"I hope it was the right thing," he thought, and then had to open his eyes because he'd heard himself saying that out loud.

"What?" Tony exclaimed, his attention veering back to Martin mid-sentence. He was still holding Martin's hand, or letting Martin's hand hold his, but his free hand had gone up to his hair, where it was hanging on like it was trying to keep his head in place.

"The investigation," Martin explained. "I hope it shows that I did the right thing."

"Pretty much sure I don't care," Tony said. "You're alive and not more dented than can be fixed, and that's all that matters."

Martin tried to think his way through that. "But it's important to know what we did wrong so we can do better next time. So we can prevent it from happening again."

Tony shook his head, and then let go of his hair with a startled blink, as if it were only the motion that told him he'd been grabbing at it. He flexed his fingers absently. "Can't prevent a lightning bolt. I mean, not unless you're Thor, and even he doesn't really prevent them, he sort of just sends them where he wants them to go instead."

"Lightning?" Martin echoed, trying to remember if there had been lightning and thunder. Explosions, yes, but... "Just before... but.... Tony, that can't be right. The Avro-RJ90 that Essex flies -- flew -- has excellent lightning protections. And planes get hit all the time. I mean, even Gertie's been hit by lightning, and we didn't crash."

"Less than a hundred feet from the ground?" Tony asked.

"Well, no, we were at fourteen thousand feet at the time." It had been a little unnerving, but physics was physics and the inside of a big metal box was a good place to be when there was lightning around. 

"Were you watching the altimeter when it happened?"

"No." He'd been busy trying not to sound as startled as he felt. Not to mention busy reassuring Arthur, who, it turned out, was not very well informed about Faraday Cages. But given a clue and a bit longer to think Martin thought he could see what Tony was driving at. "You think it was pilot error? That they tried to jink away from the lightning instinctively and it made the plane crash?"

"Not till I run some experiments." Tony retrieved the hand that had been holding Martin's so as to scrub at his eyes. "It might have been that the superheated air in the lightning channel created just enough turbulence that the best pilot in the world would have crashed the plane without more space to recover. And it took out the airfield electrical grid, too, which can't have helped."

"Oh." Martin wondered how a lightning bolt could do both of those things, but if Tony said it was true, it probably was.

"The trouble with investigations," Tony averred, glaring at the quiescent helmet, "is that somebody always ends up wanting to pin the blame. You pull all the data together and look at the evidence and call in the experts, and hey, I’ve been called into a lot investigations, so I know how it goes, and after you’ve pretty much proven that ‘hey, the laws of physics aren’t just guidelines’, some clown in an armchair decides that if only his brilliant ass had been there and done clever things everything would have all turned out hunky dory. And it’s all theory and no actual science but it sounds logical because hindsight is 20/20. Next thing you know there are politicians hauling out their pitchforks and torches because that’s how you stay in the papers and some poor guy who actually was there and is still having nightmares finds himself being critiqued on whether or not he shit his pants the ‘right’ way."

The words were the words of an angry rant, but the tone, Martin admitted to himself, was increasingly whiny. And no wonder, with Tony fighting to keep his eyes open. His hair was plastered to his head, and his skin had taken on a greyish undertone. If he weren't in the suit he'd probably fall over. "You're tired," Martin said, and Tony treated him to a sardonic grin. 

"No shit, Sherlock.” Tony leaned against the bed rail until it started to creak. “I passed tired before the sun came up. Now I'm exhausted. Wiped out. For two cents I'd crawl into bed right next to you and start snoring."

Martin started fumbling for the call button, but it was on the far side of Tony’s elbow. "Hey, JARVIS, can you give my mum a message?”

“Certainly, Captain,” the AI responded with its customary alacrity. “What message shall I give her?”

“Tell her to come back up here.” Martin leered as best he knew how. “I need to borrow tuppence."


	107. Chapter 107

Tony had almost managed to lean far enough over to kiss his boyfriend for wanting to have an unconscious billionaire wrapped in gold-titanium alloy and an aura of sweat in his bed when Martin’s blush flared and he began to babble.

“Um. Two cents. American money, JARVIS. Tell her cents not tup... what I said. Or is it too late?”

“I’m sorry Captain, I have already conveyed your message. If it is any comfort, I do not believe your mother has associated your request with any non-standard usages of the word ‘tuppence.’ She says she will be here shortly.”

“Non-standard usages?” Tony wondered.

“According to...” JARVIS began, and Martin reached for the helmet as if he could muffle it by putting a hand over its mouth.

“No, no. Just no. And don’t google it, Tony. Please? At least not in front of anyone.”

Tony pretended indignation. “As if I would ever let anyone see me google,” he said, with an exaggerated expression. “Pff. JARVIS has a much better search engine.” Of course, the overly raised eyebrows wanted to waggle, so he let them and Martin relaxed and smiled.

“JARVIS is pretty amazing,” he agreed, because JARVIS was amazing, and Martin deserved a kiss for noticing. Which Tony was glad to provide.

“Um... er... Skipper?” The curtain around the bed wafted in and out as Arthur hunted for the opening and peeked through. “Skip?”

Tony disengaged without haste. Arthur had seen them kissing lots of times. And moving too fast wasn’t going to be a good idea.

“What is it, Arthur?” Martin said patiently. 

The younger man held up a coin. “Your mum said you needed money? Maybe? She’s coming, only she sent me first because you shouldn’t need money, not with the National Health and all, and she was positive you didn’t mean the other thing, so maybe you meant you wanted this?” Arthur held up a bedpan.

“No, no, I’m fine, everything’s fine,” Martin said hastily, and his blush was still high on his cheeks. “I was going to give the money to Tony.”

“For a joke,” Tony interjected. He was way too tired to try to explain it. Not to Arthur. He pushed himself back upright and then had to close his eyes and wait for the world to stop doing a rumba. Which wasn’t fair, because Tony’d been awake lots longer than this before lots of times without wanting to toss his cookies. “And as much as I appreciate the offer,” he went on, glad that the suit was keeping him on his feet, and hoping Martin didn’t notice how much the suit was keeping him on his feet, “I really ought to grab a shower first.” He got his eyes open. Nope. Martin was looking at him with that worried crease between his eyebrows, and so was Arthur. Who had his own worried crease. Which was wrong. Just wrong.

“A shower and food. And sleep,” Martin said with just a corner of his mouth turned up, and because he was a good boyfriend, instead of being like everyone else who thought Tony didn’t get enough food and sleep, he added, “And coffee when you wake up and come back to visit me.” His smile turned wistful. “You will come back and visit me?”

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away,” Tony promised. Then he sang it, because the Stones were always worth singing. “Wiiiild horses...” Martin laughed, and then coughed, and this time Tony managed to knock the straw, the cup and the pitcher to the floor, because turning fast wasn’t a good idea. “Rats.”

Arthur brightened. “I’ll fetch a mop!” he offered, and vanished.

“Oh, god,” Martin gasped between coughs. “Maybe you should have someone drive you to your hotel.”

“JARVIS can fly me over,” Tony said, reaching for the helmet and starting to unhook the power cord thing he’d rigged. “That’s probably easier. ‘Cause crawling into a car while I’m in the suit is...” he shook his head. “Nope. Not a good plan.” The gauntlets were down at the foot of the bed, just far enough away that Tony had to lean to reach them, and if he’d needed more proof that it was time to get horizontal he’d have asked for it, because Martin already looked worried enough for both of them. “Naw, I’ll be all right with JARVIS,” he said, as he pulled on the gauntlets, trying for a nonchalance he didn’t feel. He grinned at Martin and got a small smile in return.

“I guess that’s all right then. I just wish I could go with you.” Martin sighed. “If I only hadn’t been stupid enough to get hurt.” He ran fidgety fingers over the IV, being careful not to dislodge it. “It’ll be forever before I can have a shower.”

“I’ll think of you the whole time I’m having mine,” Tony promised.

“You’ll never get clean that way,” Martin joked apologetically, and Tony wanted to kiss him again, only just at that moment the sound of voices and feet warned him that they were about to have company.

“Martin?” Wendy Crieff pulled back the curtain, “Mr. Stark, have you finished yet? The nurses tell me that they need to take Martin down to Radiology for a test.” She had one of the nurses at her elbow, who nodded confirmation, although she was watching Tony with huge eyes.

“I was just getting ready to go,” Tony said, waving the helmet a little as proof, and giving the nurse a smile so she would stop looking like she expected to get eaten. “And I told you, you can call me Tony.”

Wendy fluttered away the permission with a nervous gesture that reminded him of Martin. “And you’ve asked all the questions and things? There won’t be anyone else coming around to bother Martin while he’s still so sick?”

“Just us medical mice,” the nurse muttered, and Tony’s smile for her got a lot more authentic. She was checking the monitors and making notes into a handheld terminal, and doing other nurse stuff, and Tony hoped she had some pain meds in her pocket, because the only thing keeping Martin from being a good match for his sheets was his freckles and the patchy remains of his sunburn.

“Mum,” Martin protested. “If the investigators have more questions, I need to help.”

Tony gave way as Wendy came around to his side of the bed, because he knew about getting between the mama bear and the cub and he was going to need his nads when Martin was feeling better. Wendy immediately began rearranging Martin’s pillow with a proprietorial air. “You need to rest,” she said firmly. “Which you can’t, if you’re being badgered.” She shot a glare at Tony and tugged a kleenex out of her pocket to dab at the tearstains on Martin’s cheeks.

“It wasn’t badgering,” Martin said, although he didn’t protest being mom-handled. “I need to know what happened as much as anyone does.” 

“And do you know now?” she asked, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. Tony could see how careful she was not to come close to Martin’s sore ear, and how readily Martin accepted the comfort of her touch. He nodded, and cleared his throat, trying to hold back a cough and not entirely succeeding.

But “Tony?” he said, when he could talk again, and Tony wasn’t relieved, not really, because it wasn’t cool to be jealous of a guy for having a mom to take care of him when he was hurt. Especially not when the guy still wanted his boyfriend to be there.

“Yeah?” Tony said. He had the gauntlets on now, but he could reach over and take Martin’s hand if he was careful not to slip in the spilled water.

“You’ll be okay, right?”

“I’ll be fantastic.” He hadn’t figured out how to pick up the suitcase without tossing his cookies, but he was an engineer, it’d come to him. “You’re going to be good for the docs, right?”

“I don’t think I have much choice.” Martin eyed the nurse, who was busily disconnecting various things. “Am I being moved again?” 

“You’re scheduled for Radiology, Mr. Crieff,” she reminded him, and yeah, good, she was adding something to the IV that was making Martin’s eyes unfocus. 

“Now?” he managed, though, through the fuzz of the meds. “‘Sawfully early.”

The nurse nodded, professionally pleased by the way her patient was slumping deeper into his pillows. “Some of the tests will have less ambiguous results if you have them done before breakfast.”

Tony’s stomach growled loud enough to be heard from the armor, and Martin giggled. “I think that’s my cue.” Tony said, grinning at the cute. He nodded to the nurse. “You’ll bring him back here when you’re done?”

“Yes.” Not even the name of Stark was going to get Martin a private room; there were too many burn patients who needed to be put where they faced less risk of infection. But this place by the window in the alcove at the end of the orthopedics ward was quiet enough that Martin could probably rest once the doctors gave him a chance. The nurse disengaged the bed brake and began to tug it out of position.

“See ya later, Spitfire,” Tony let go of Martin’s hand reluctantly, wishing he had a chance to steal a goodbye kiss.

“Don’t forget!” Martin ordered, craning his neck so he could look at Tony as long as he possible. “Coffee!” Another nurse, or at least a guy in scrubs, had turned up to help push the bed, and it was moving away entirely too quickly.

“I never forget the coffee!” Tony called after him, not too loudly, because he didn’t want to attract the attention of the other people on the ward. He could see a few of them now that the curtain was out of the way, sleeping or fussing at the monitors that hung beside each bed. There was the kid from the London office, doing his best to look like he was the world’s skinniest security goon. There was an elderly lady with a cart at the far end, distributing breakfasts on trays. And there was Arthur, in scrubs pants now under the plaid shirt, but still clearly not a member of the staff, trying to persuade a guy in coveralls to part with his mop.

And Wendy, still at Tony’s elbow. 

“I think I should take this opportunity to have Geedi run me over to Martin’s place so I can fetch his things,” she said, in the tone of voice of someone who really didn’t want to take their own suggestion. “We can drop Arthur off at his home along the way.”

“Do you have the key?” 

“No, but I have the address.” She looked at Tony curiously. “Do you have the key?”

He shook his head. “No.” But if Martin had never let his mother see the attic where he lived it wasn’t really all that surprising that he’d been so flustered and ashamed when Tony had arrived on his doorstep. “What kind of things does he need?”

She produced a pamphlet, already crumpled by nervous hands. “Toothbrush, comb, washcloth, some loose fitting clothing, shaving things, towels,” she read off, and Tony was surprised, because didn’t the hospital provide most of those things? He took the pamphlet and skimmed down the list. 

‘You can just buy most of this stuff,” he said. He looked up, thinking to snag the kid from London to do the buying, but he was trotting along in the wake of Martin’s bed and almost out of sight. Because Martin needed someone with him, and the kid (Geedi Ishaar Dinaase but Somali born so use the first name, got it Pepper) had the right attitude, even if it would take six months in the gym before his neck was thick enough to meet Happy Hogan’s minimum standards for muscle. Not that muscle was what Martin needed, not exactly. Just someone fierce enough to run interference if the press turned up. Someone with Martin’s best interests at heart. Someone like his mom.

Yeah.

“You should swap with Geedi. You’ll be better company for Martin, and you can get hospital security to fend off nosy reporters for a couple of hours. That’ll give Geedi a chance to take Arthur home and he can stop off at the airfield and get Martin’s flight bag for his shaving kit and spare clothes on the way. Then he can buy the rest of the stuff on the way back.”

Wendy peered up at him. “Pardon?”

Tony thought about it and realized that he’d only said about half of the last sentence of what was in his head aloud, so he repeated it, slowly and audibly.

He could see the way her spine unbent a little with relief, even while she was shaking her head. “I don’t want to put you to any unnecessary expense,” she began, and Tony sighed.

“Martin really takes after you, doesn’t he?” He went to run his fingers through his hair and nope, nope, not with the gauntlet, because individual hairs got caught and pulled out and boy that was enough to wake him up a little. “Look,” he took the offending gauntlet and waved it at the rest of the ward, “There’ve got to be a lot of people in here who don’t have the stuff they need because their suitcases are either at Fitton or burned up. So Geedi’s going to get a bunch of stuff to pass out, and Martin’ll just be one of the people he passes stuff to. Fair enough?”

“I’ll pay you back for Martin’s share,” she said firmly. “It’s the least I can do.” And boy, Tony did not have the energy for this.

“Sure. Fine. Go, or you won’t be able to catch up. And don’t forget to take Arthur!” he added as she bustled away.

And then Tony was alone, standing in a puddle of water, with a suitcase he didn’t want to bend over and pick up because he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t fall over when he tried and a bunch of strangers around the room in various states of trying not to stare who’d be trying not to laugh when he landed on his nose. Fuck it. JARVIS could do it. Tony put on the helmet, and made a couple of reassuring noises at Steve so he’d shut up, because no, he didn’t need Thor to come fetch him, he was going already, and they’d better have bacon waiting for him. And coffee. Then he set the comm to privacy mode. “Catch J,” he said, letting his eyes close as he turned over control to the AI. 

“I have you, sir.” The suit straightened, and adjusted itself around him, bringing his head up in spite of the way he was already three-fourths asleep.

“Grab my stuff and get us out of here. It’s been a long, long day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here ends "Clipped Wings". The next story will be called "Grounded".

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the lovely [Sabrina_Phynn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sabrina_Phynn/profile) who has kindly offered to lend a touch of medical authority to my internet research and handwaving. Any remaining mistakes of a medical nature are mine.


End file.
